Friday Email: 21 February 2014
Every Friday morning our lead analyst Mark Riding sends out his weekly run-down and upcoming events in the investor calendar, like this one:
Another relatively uncertain week but our move to a mildly bullish stance has proved justified with the FTSE 100 rising from 6680 to 6850 over the week. Our latest research on John Wood group was rewarded with a 46p rise in the shares on the day of the results last Tuesday and we also received an unexpected 29% increase in the dividend and a promise of a further 25% in the coming year followed by 'double digit' increases thereafter. Good stuff! The shares are up from 672p to 748p this morning, up 11.3% since publication last Friday. Most of the other companies reporting this week had little to offer. Galliford Try of the housebuilders did well, as you would expect with the stimulus being provided for the sector. Galliford managed a 25% increase in the interim but with only 1.8x cover compared to John Wood's 4.5x cover. I know which one I prefer. Essentra and Rexam also did well with 23% and 14% increases respectively.
We feel that the state of the market is such that it is not justified to produce a dividend of the week each week and as we alluded to in our last Friday digest, we are going to produce pieces as we have done with Easyjet and John Wood, i.e as and when we feel a good opportunity has arisen. With the reporting season underway, we are confident that more will emerge in the coming weeks.
The week ahead is a very very busy reporting calendar with our former dividend of the week, ITV (which has more than doubled) reporting as well as the ever tempting MAN group. It will be interesting to see what they do with their dividend.
For those of you that are interested in OPG (one of our small company pickes of the year), this is a decent interview and there is even a mention of a dividend!!
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.
