Barclays Shares: A Turnaround Amid Uncertainty

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4 – Can Barclays shares turn a corner and return to prominence?

Barclays shares were trading as high as around 790p in 2007. At that time, few people could have thought that the share price of the company would dramatically drop within the next couple of years, to reach a low of just over 50p. Even though it’s trading now at three times that price at 150p, the company’s future seems highly uncertain.

A large factor for this is Brexit. Even though Barclays is a global company, it still has significant interests in the UK and is very dependent on the UK and wider European economies for its growth. Brexit may turn out to be a bad or good thing in the long run, but we simply do not know. In the immediate future, it now appears likely that a slowdown …show more content…

At the end of 2011, Barclays’s net assets were reported at $2.42 trillion USD, which made the bank the seventh largest in the world. While this may seem to be a great achievement, its share price has been quite volatile over the last several years. Because of this apparent contradiction between a company appearing to be very successful yet having poorly performing shares, many people are wondering why Barclay shares are falling to such an obvious extent.

As is the case in many instances of share depreciation, the answer is complicated. One of the reasons for the latest drop is that New York’s Attorney General has brought a lawsuit against Barclays. This suit claims that Barclays has committed fraudulent practices, including falsifying key documentation and misrepresenting the benefits the company was offering to its major institutional clients.

The lawsuit was the result of the scrutiny over the company’s use of a type of trading referred to as ‘dark pool’ trading. This is when clients privately trade large parcels of shares, with prices and costs that are not transparent. Barclays has attempted to avoid the bad repercussions resulting from these allegations by conducting their own internal investigation into the practice, and hopefully making it more open to any public

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