Striking oil
THE winners from Britoil, like the winners from Telecom, are the licensed dealers in securities, outside the Stock Exchange. Private investors who got any Britoil shares at all got 100 or 150 of them, There is not much you can do with 100 shares, except put them behind the clock on the mantel- piece, which is what the Government hopes. Ask your broker to sell them, and his charges will swallow your profits. A licensed dealer, though, will buy them from you free of all charges. He pays his way out of the spread between his buying and selling prices. Here is his chance to find new customers, many of them, no doubt, first-time investors, drawn in by the heavy advertising campaigns which prom- oted the share issues. In due course these customers will find (as Telecom customers have already found) that the licensed dealers will offer them other investments from their varied shelves, some of them as solid as Telecom or Britoil, some not.