Friday Email: 09 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 had another topsy turvy week but is up about 40 points over the course of the past 5 days. Not too many companies reported but all of those that did produced dividend increases so no complaints there. Nothing spectacular though with BT topping the pile with a 15% increase. Aberdeen Asset Management managed a 12.5% increase to maintain their very impressive dividend growth record. Imperial Tobacco proved once again that they are a quality dividend play with their usual 10% increase and the promise of the same again at the finals stage. We were very bullish on them earlier in the year and investors were rewarded yesterday with them hitting a 52 week high at 2605p. Experian, Sage and today 3i infrastructure disappointed slightly, but we think Sage remain a top quality company with a tendancy to pay out special dividends and we will be keeping an eye on them for members.

Sainsbury's did ok in what remains a tough grocery market, but we are sticking with them and they certainly sit high on the optimizer right now, so the yield attraction is very much there. We still believe that the downside is limited and analysts forecasts are very undemanding.

The week ahead is fairly busy and we will be watching ICAP carefully as we believe that they have high quality management and will make a comeback at some stage. They have held their dividend through tough times and we are looking for signs of a possible resumption of growth in the dividend. We have also tended to favour Vedanta in the mining / natural resource sector for their broad spread of quality businesses so we will be looking at their results closely. One of our big favourites, Easyjet also reports and it will be interesting to see if they are still in a position to continue their spectacular dividend growth since they started paying dividends in 2011.

We still do not have a particularly strong view on the market and the summer months may well go the same way as the year so far. However, opportunities always arise and we will be looking to spot them and analyse them for members.

 

This email was originally sent on Friday 09 May 2014

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.