Has Sid finally come of age?
If you see Sid, tell him was the catchphrase of the British Gas privatisation in the mid 1980s as most of us will remember, and in December this year it will have been 21 years since the privatisation which really captured the imagination of the public, namely BT. Since those times there have been a host of privatisations, followed by the demutualisations of the 1990s but how are these investments looking today for those who held on as opposed to just selling the shares on the first day of trading at a (usually) thumping profit? The Investors Chronicle recently calculated that £100 invested in each of the major privatisations when they came to market a total of £2800 would have totalled more than £33000 by March 2004, with all dividends reinvested. Similar good fortune has largely been enjoyed by those investors handed free shares in the demutualisation of the building societies and life assurers in the 90s. Perhaps in some ways this is not too much of a surprise after all, many of the
