Friday Email: 22 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:

This week the market has been directionless having had the momentum checked by the Cyprus situation where the banks are apparently scared to open.

This has not been a great week in terms of results and Dividend declarations. Monday and Tuesday were pretty dead and Wednesday saw Eurasian Natural Resource Corporation fail to pay any final dividend. Greggs, one of the great dividend payers could only managed a flat final dividend which coupled with the interim meant a meagre increase of 1% for the year as a whole.

Thursday was much better with Premier Oil announcing their first dividend for a very long time and although it was signalled at the interim stage, it was much bigger than analysts were expecting. Next announced another really good set of results and, again, a bigger dividend increase than was expected. For the year as a whole, the Next dividend rose 16.7%, the sixth consecutive year where the dividend has risen by a double digit percentage. Ted Baker also produced a 13.7% increase, making it a pretty good day for the clothing retail sector.

For dividend of the week we dipped our toe into the mining sector taking a contrarian view. Poor prices have hit the sector hard, but scarce resources are what they are and a turnaround in prices will move swiftly to the bottom line.

The corporate calendar is empty today. Next week promises to be a touch busier and includes the results of two former dividends of the week, Resolution Ltd. and Kingfisher.

 

 

This email was originally sent on Friday 22 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.