Friday Email: 19 April 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:
The market has had a torrid time this week falling 200 points. The miners continue to be a drag on the index as fears over slowing world growth have surfaced. Any small miss on Chinese GDP growth has a disproportionate effect on mining stocks. I think people forget that China is now growing against a pretty big base so 7% is still very significant. At some point we will need to drop the obsession with growth.
A whole raft of companies trade without the dividend this Wednesday including some of our dividend of the week selections notably Man Group, Legal & General and Centrica. In addition to those three, we have Drax, Balfour Beatty, Tesco, National Express, UBM, Intu properties, Old Mutual, Rolls Royce, Aggreko, Kazakhmys, Rexam, greggs, Tullet Prebon, Rathbone, Kentz, Hansteen, informa and Playtech.
This week marked the first time in over a quarter of a century that Tesco has not produced a full year dividend increase.
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.
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Read next: 12 April 2013
This week was another eventless week on the corporate calendar. The markets have performed pretty well, but for me by far the most important event was the death of Baroness Thatcher. We don't do politics at DividendMax, but I found all of those people dancing on her grave pretty tasteless. No matter what you thought of her policies, she was a true patriot who gave her all for Britain's national interest. I was an investment analyst when the big bang happened and the change was dramatic. To this day, I do not know if it was the right thing to do. i do not know if it contributed to the financial crisis that we are still hurting from now. Even with a degree in economics that is too difficult a conundrum for me to fathom. What I do know is that a checks and balances system had built up over a hundred-odd years. You had a stockjobber who operated from the floor of the London Stock Exchange (now known as a market maker) You had stock brokers who gave advice to clients and used the stockjobber to actually buy the stock. You had merchant bankers who performed corporate activities. You had investment managers who were effectively the clients of the stockbrokers, who invariably also had private client departments as well.