Friday Email: 20 September 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 a very quiet week on the corporate front with Galliford Try being the star performer after it posted a 23% increase in the full year dividend. Redrow, as we expected returned to the dividend list with a 1p final dividend and Smiths group posted a 4% dividend increase and threw in a special dividend of 25p per share. The stock market still lacks direction at the moment in the UK as the Dow and the S&P hit all time highs. The FTSE 100 is up slightly on the week following Thursdays bounce on the back of QE tapering in the US not being quite as imminent as thought.

So, it is the same story of the markets being addicted to the cheap money on offer. We still think a correction is due in the coming weeks, but overall, we expect the market to be at least as high at the year-end as it is now. It currently looks overbought in the US and any correction over there will be felt over here. Metals prices were on the up yesterday and that will benefit the miner heavy FTSE 100, where the miners have been a drag for some time now. As we have pointed out before, if there is a real, sustainable economic recovery globally, then the miners will be very good value at these levels.

The week ahead looks like being one of the quietest for some time on the corporate front.

This email was originally sent on Friday 20 September 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.

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