Friday Email: 25 April 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:
A dull looking week on the face of it turned out to be quite an exciting week with the Pharmaceutical sector in deal making mode. The model portfolio got a boost from AstraZeneca and still continues to outperform the market. Will Astra be bid for by Pfizer? In the tech sector very sound results from the worlds best company Apple boosted Imagination Technologies. Apple have decided that their shares are too cheap, so they are buying back ever more of them, thereby boosting earnings per share and all the while increasing the dividend. Not by as much as we expected because they want to focus their cash on the buyback for now. It's a bit like the Next stategy and we have seen how that has worked over the years. One of our members wrtoe to me in the week calling the situation of share buybacks and increasing dividends 'Total yield' I have never heard that expression, but it sounds good to me provided that the company can easily afford it and with Apple you have that in spades. Back to Imagination. There is a great deal of short interest in the stock and when the tide of news changes, it will pop as the short squeeze takes place and there is very little stock around.
There were a couple of dividend increases in the past week from Unilever and Associated British Foods.
The week ahead takes us into May and things pick up quite a bit with plenty of Quarterly results out. There are some big companies reporting including Glaxo, BP, BskyB, BG Group, Shire, Whitbread, Smith & Nephew, Home Retail and N Brown.
Our next piece of work, which will be on the insurance industry will be out on Monday.
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: 18 April 2014
A decent rally on Thursday took the market 40 points higher for the week otherwise we were headed for another flat one. The bombed out food retailing sector was given a lift by Tesco as its shares climbed from 282p to 297p on the day of its results, but the euphoria evaporated by Thursday and the shares ended up 7p on the week. The other companies reporting this week did little to excite on the dividend front with Sports Direct increasing by 3% and Debenhams only holding their interim at last years level. Another quiet week lies ahead with only a couple of companies reporting to the market including Associated British Foods. However, we will see a lot of trading ststements next week.