Pembroke: Punters back loser

THERE ARE a few stock market dabblers who will be regretting that ShareLink, the telephone share service that went public last month, ever made buying shares so easy.

Topping the list of the most popular shares bought through the system in July is Medeva, which shed 100p off its share price in a day after a profits warning. ShareLink says 80 per cent of buyers in Medeva shrewdly bought after the warning on recovery hopes. But that still leaves a gloomy 20 per cent who bought at 200p plus. 'It's a very popular stock,' explains a spokesman weakly.

THE CORPORATE world will come in for a lampooning at next week's Edinburgh Festival, courtesy of a young London anthropologist. Nick Mayhew, who describes himself as 'a bit of an angry young man', has developed a one-man, multi-media show called 'Tall, dark, handsome and number one' in which he attempts to expose the cynical ways of men in suits.

'We're always reading about directors getting more pay rises, about the Cadbury report and so on and I suddenly thought: 'Well hang on a minute, who are these guys and who are they responsible to?' ' Mayhew uses slides and advertising campaigns, including the Marlboro Man and the Man from Del Monte, to enlighten the masses. The aim is to shatter a few illusions by showing what corporations are really like. Or, as he delicately puts it: 'It's like seeing your father in his underpants for the first time.'

BRYAN HOTSTON, a director of BZW, was thanking his luck yesterday after winning a prize in the Cowes Week prize draw at the City's Bleeding Heart wine bar.

Mr Hotston did not win the first prize, a Swiss Corum watch, waterproof to a depth of 100 metres. But he did bag the second prize - a bottle of Mumm champagne delivered to his home every month for a year. He says he would not have wanted the watch anyway. 'It was rather vulgar and tasteless.'

CITIBANK is saying all kinds of strange things in the latest German edition of ]Forbes magazine. In an article entitled 'German-American friendship', Victor Menezes, Citibank's chief of European consumer banking, based in Brussels, complains that Citibank's private client business in Britain is not as successful as in Germany. Why? 'We have problems understanding these people's language,' he says.

In a further desperate attempt to ingratiate itself with the Frankfurt bankers, Citibank offers the enlightening information that its New York branch network is headed by a German.