Friday Email: 01 March 2013

Every Friday morning our lead analyst Mark Riding sends out his weekly run-down and upcoming events in the investor calendar, like this one:

That was some week. The busiest of the year so far and a shed load of companies reporting. Delighted that we were able to announce our partnership with Digital Look who are a giant of the industry and have a very exciting roadmap.

Once again we saw a sell off. This time due to the Italians. I woke up to the radio announcing that a comedian had got 25% of the vote. You've got to laugh! The markets did not like it and fell sharply, but as with recent attempts to sell off, bounced back and we are up on the week.

Somebody said to me that the resiliance is due to the income seekers and I think that could be true. Obviously with a product like DividendMax, you hope it is true, but really, with talk of negative interest rates, the search for yield has to continue.

Once again, this week demonstrated the strength of the dividend story with hardly any dividend cuts again and a lot of companies beating our estimates (again).

My highlight of the week was ITV which featured as my dividend of the week on the 8th January and did not disappoint by increasing the final dividend by 50% and declaring a special dividend of 4p per share. They actually fell on the day and we took the opportunity to add a lump to the trading portfolio at 117p. The market woke up on Thursday and they rose 5%.

Elsewhere, there are some incredible relatively unknown companies. I do not know it well, but RPS group increased their dividend for the 19th year in succession by 15%. That is big in compound growth terms at over 1400% and with dividend cover of 3x, it should happen again next year and probably beyond. St James's place increased by 33% for the third year running.

Bovis Homes and Persimmon demonstrated the recovery of the housebuilders. bovis increasing its dividend 80% and persimmon kicking off its massive return to shareholders explained in my dividend of the week of the 24th January.

GKN increased its final dividend by 20%, Dialight by 35%, Senior by 22%, Dechra by 15%, Elementis by 14%, jupiter by 13%, Bodycote by 13%. there was a massive increase by Howden Joinery and an old favourite of the Divi max trading portfolio, Man group actually beat our estimate of 8p and turned in 8.26p......dont forget they were in the seventies not too long ago.

So, it remains happy days for the dividend investor and for me, I expect it to continue.

This email was originally sent on Friday 01 March 2013

The Friday email is delivered to over 20,000 subscriber’s every week, and remains a widely read run-down of recent events and what investors can expect in the week ahead written by our chief analyst Mark Riding.

It’s included as part of the free DividendMax trial.