Friday Email: 02 May 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:
The FTSE 100 has been on the rise this week having gone up over 100 points. Our latest research on Admiral has proved a success so far and we have almost recovered the ex-dividend factor already. It was another quiet week on the results front with the biggest dividend increase coming from Whitbread who continue to prosper. The fight for AstraZeneca has begun and it is now the top performer in the model portfolio overtaking Anglo American.
The week ahead has some interesting companies reporting including Aberdeen Asset Management, Experian, Sainsbury, Imperial Tobacco, BT and Sage. It will be interesting to see how Aberdeen get on. They have had a superb dividend track record of late and it will be interesting to see if they can keep it going. We will also be watching Sainsbury's closely to see if they are still outperforming their peers.
The market still remains difficult as we enter a time of the year when returns to investors are not very good historically. We will continue to seek out value and pass our ideas onto members.
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: 25 April 2014
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.