‘Shares I bought have done very well but should I sell or leave them to my sons?’

I’m in a bit of a quandary. Some years ago, I invested in one company, the only shares I ever bought. Over the years since, I have watched them with bemusement as they soared. The company was Kingspan.I’m now 88 years old and I am considering selling them but not sure if this is a good idea.I have three sons who could benefit. If I leave them as they are, how would they share them?P.F.READ MOREWell, the first thing to say is congratulations on your good fortune, though people would be well advised not to follow your “investment strategy” as the Government looks to persuade them to move at least some of the money that they have on deposit in banks earning little or nothing into better performing investments.For sure, it has worked out for you, but it is a high risk game. Just ask those who invested in what they were consistently told were Ireland’s “blue-chip” banks in advance of the financial crash.There are a few things here. First, just because an investment has performed up to now is no automatic indicator that it will continue to do so.Kingspan is currently doing well. Having weathered the storm around the involvement of its products in the deadly fire in the residential Grenfell Tower block in London, it is continuing to expand its business both geographically and in the range of products it provides to the construction sector.Only in the past week, it has made its biggest investment to date, acquiring an Irish engineering group, BMC Manufacturing, that has become a serious industry player on the back of the worldwide boom in data centre construction, for €850 million.That’s well over twice the value of its previous biggest deal, and it could rise further if BMC’s owners get up to another €50 million in performance related add-ons.The company followed that up days later by taking a majority stake in Grupo LTN, an insulation panel company that would fall into the Irish group’s more traditional business specialism, in a move that expands its Latin American operations and marks its first step into a new market – Argentina.The shares are on the rise, up close to 43 per cent over the past year and nearly five times the price they were a decade ago.However, if you had bought at the end of 2021 when the shares traded as high as €106.65, you would still be out of pocket four and a half years later. Poor market conditions saw the shares plunge almost 60 per cent by September of the following year.Twelve months earlier, the shares tanked by around 28 per cent over a number of months in the wake of disclosures at the Grenfell inquiry.So success when it comes to investing in shares is very much a matter of timing. And by focusing an investment on just one company, you really are concentrating your bet. For every Kingspan or Apple or Microsoft, there are hundreds of listed businesses that lose their investors’ money. Plenty of studies show that most of the gains in US stock market indices over recent years have been down to the fortunes of just a handful of businesses. Everything else did little more than tread water at best.That’s why most advisers will encourage people looking to invest to consider putting their money into funds that try to replicate the performance of the wider market or across a number of assets classes – perhaps shares, bonds and property, for instance.Sell or holdBack to your personal situation. You want to know whether to sell these shares now, or not. And if you choose not to, you worry about how your sons will deal with them after you have gone?The first thing to note is your own tax situation. You don’t say when you bought these shares or at what price but if you sell them now, you will have to pay capital gains tax.You are allowed make a gain of up to €1,270 on the sale of shares or any other asset in a tax year but, after that, the Revenue will take 33 per cent of all your winnings on this investment.And, given your bemusement at their performance, I am assuming this will be a sizeable chunk of change.If, however, you hold on to them until you die, you pay no capital gains tax at all and the full value of your investment in Kingspan will go to your estate. Any capital gain dies with the owner of the shares, or other asset, with the clock going back to zero for whomever takes ownership of them after that.Of course, you are taking a chance that the shares will continue to perform but you seem comfortable doing that so far.What then for your sons? How will they split these shares?There are two options, which could be dictated by the terms of your will, or by the decision of whomever you have appointed as executor of your estate.Either the shares could be sold by the executor with the proceeds being split among your children, or one-third of the shares could be allocated to each son.That would allow them to benefit from the company’s further progress that has pleased you so much over recent years but also exposes them to the risk of losing the value of some of their inheritance if Kingspan was to hit another rocky spell.In part, your decision could be informed by your son’s comfort with direct share investment. If it is something they are familiar with and understand, they may enjoy the chance to own these shares.However, if they don’t dabble in such investments, you would be doing them no favour in landing them with such a specific investment.Also, you do not say how many of these shares you have and that might also be a factor. If it is only a small number, dividing them three ways could be messy. There are costs involved in selling shares – and in transferring them to new names generally. Plenty of people in Ireland currently own handfuls of share in companies where the cost of selling would outweigh any benefit to them from the investment. I can only imagine your sons would be very pleased to receive an inheritance from you but the most straightforward approach might be to sell the shares and let your sons enjoy the proceeds and make their own investment decisions. Whether that is under instruction in your will or left to the discretion of your executor is a matter for you.One final thing, whatever you decide to do. If you have a share certificate for these shares, make sure your executor or a family member knows where it is. That will make it much easier to deal with them when you are gone – whether they are being sold or transferred. And if they are held electronically, make sure that information is known. It just saves time, hassle and, possibly, expense.