Friday Email: 30 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 is close to fourteen year highs as merger speculation has crept in. The week just past was very quiet with good dividend increases from Aveva and Paypoint (13 and 16% respectively)

The week ahead is even quieter as the mini reporting season that we have just seen (the March year-ends) winds down. Around about this time last year the FTSE 100 fell sharply and was down over 10% towards the end of July. The direction of the market remains, as always, very difficult to call and particularly so right now. Our latest research will focus on companies that are returning cash to shareholders via various methods and will be published on Monday. An element of caution is required with the market near its highs, so we will target those companies that are returning cash via various methods including buybacks.

Our start of the year small cap selections had a good week with both OPG and Toumaz showing very strong gains. We still like both stocks very much and feel there is much to come from both companies over the next few years. We will have an appraisal of all five companies at the half yearly stage.

This email was originally sent on Friday 30 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.