Sit tight and valuations will come down

If you must throw your money at the sort of pitches that Crowdcube are publishing, then our advice is to sit tight  - all of you - until the pitch gets near to its end date. Post a few queries about the over valuation. And wait.

As with so many of the completed pithes recently, the founders will move the equity offer in your favour, often by as much a 50%. Crowdcube will oblige by extending the pitch ad infinitum - its their only way of paying their £2m annual administration costs and you will end up with a far greater share of nothing.

Current examples are Early Bird up 25%, Empiribox up by ~20% and GF Foods up by 55%. We wouldnt recommend any of them but we like the idea that the Crowd is at last learning that it has some say.

When is a Crowd really only a small group of friends?

Sqaureknot take the crowd out of Crowdfunding.

The Glasgow based site has been going for almost 3 years and yet the pitches on the site have very little resemblance to anything we know as equity crowdfunding. The few pitches that have completed, have between 7 and 3 investors each, putting in amounts from £60k to £100k. That is barely a group let alone a crowd and is almost certainly just friends or even the company's own directors investing. Pitches have been known to last over a year here - who knows, maybe longer.

All this is carried out with the sanction of the FCA via a third party called Kession Capital Ltd. There is clearly something wrong with the FCA, their system of verifying the quasi licenses these third parties hand out or both.