Friday Email: 25 October 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 stock market has gone pretty much as we thought it would this time last week and has resumed the bull run with the FTSE 100 now above 6700 having risen over 6% since the US budget mini crisis. The next target is the years high of 6803, which we believe will be achieved, certainly by the year end, but it could come sooner than that. The big worry of 'the end of QE' seems to have gone for now at least and so the main hurdle for the bulls effectively went with the US jobs numbers this past week. We are expecting a new all time high for the FTSE 100 by the end of the year, but, as always, it will not go up in a straight line.

The past week saw a little more news although not too much excitement on the dividend front, with only Whitbread providing us with a dividend increase in double digit percentage figures. Glaxo gave us exactly what we expected, Home Retail continued its miserly streak paying only 1p at the interim stage when it has a third of its market cap in cash. We are now approaching its most cash generative part of the year and a decent dividend increase at the finals stage should be on the cards.

Next week sees us ambling along with another quiet-ish week that is dominated by the oil majors BP and Royal Dutch Shell and also BG Group reporting to the market. We also have BT, recent dividend of the week Asta Zeneca and Royal bank of Scotland who will not be paying a dividend. The number of companies going ex-dividend is the smallest for some weeks now with only four companies that we cover going ex this Wednesday.

So, at the moment, it looks like a clear run for the bulls, but there is still a long way to go before the year-end and mini corrections will occur. The major issues that worry us are still lurking and we do know that the US debt ceiling will raise its head again early in the new year.

This week, we released multiple portfolios, which has been by far the most requested enhancement from our clients as many people want to keep ISA's, SIPPS, etc in separate portfolios. The response so far has been very positive.

This email was originally sent on Friday 25 October 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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