Friday Email: 14 March 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:
It has been a tough week with the FTSE 100 falling over 200 points. We mentioned last week that we were going to look out for the Morrisons Supermarket numbers. Fortunately, that is all we did as the shares tonked almost 10% yesterday. Occassionally, we will talk about companies before their numbers, but Morrisons was too risky for that and they did also confirm the weakening of their dividend policy as expected. That said, yesterday's fall was significant enough to merit a look and we will examine the supermarket sector in some detail in the coming weeks.
Looking back, there were some decent dividend increases last week including Hikma, Inchcape, Prudential, SIG and Computacenter. esure delivered a first final dividend that was some way above our expectations and that dividend alone will pay you 5%. It goes ex-dividend on 9th April for 13.3p. The share price is 266p.
Looking forward, the reporting season is winding down and very few companies are reporting over the next few weeks. Have earnings met the expectations that were built up last year as markets performed very strongly? Our view is that they have not quite done enough and therefore stock selection, as always, remains very important. Dividends as always remain important and if the market does not go up this year, then most of your return will come from dividends.
Cathay International Holdings, one of our small cap picks of the year announced this morning that they will produce their final results on Friday 28th March and Toumaz will announce theirs on Monday 31st.
We produced our latest piece yesterday, which can be found here
http://www.dividendmax.co.uk/dividend-investor-news/1918/our-latest-research-1332014
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: 07 March 2014
Many thanks to all of you who wrote to point out that a dry squid would be a dead squid, but a damp squib is in fact a damp firework / mining device in old parlance. I could say that I put it in to see how many of you were awake, but alas that is not true. My only excuse is that i was writing very late in the evening. Good to see so many of you read the email and thanks for the education. Somebody even kindly sent me this: