Friday Email: 11 July 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:

That was a tough week in spite of very little real news. As is often the case at this time of the year scaremongering takes over on very little in the way of actual company news and this was the case on Thursday when fear of European meltdown suddenly raised its head again. We see these sorts of falls as a buying opportunity and have mentioned Easyjet on more than one occassion this week. Looking ahead there are some nice dividends to be picked up from SSE and Berkeley Group in particular who are returning cash to shareholders in a big way over the next 7 years. They are in a sector that continues to boom and sit over £4 below their recent high. They go ex-dividend for 90p on 20th August. Easyjet may be a longer wait but we expect that it will be well worth it as the stock has retreated almost 50% from its recent high on little news. We are still expecting a big dividend increase and possibly another special dividend again this year. It has been very interesting trading Next over the past few weeks as traders chose to ignore their stated buyback level of £64. This enabled investors to pick up the stock cheaply over the past few weeks, safe in the knowledge that the company would start buying back stock at anything below £64. This facilitated the easy pick up of the 143p dividend because it was clear that the stock would be supported by the company once the ex-dividend had been factored in. So, when the market fell sharply yesterday, Next kept its word and the stock rose 86p on the day.

The week ahead stays quiet on the reporting front with IG Group reporting their final results on Tuesday and Sports direct on Thursday.

Our six monthly review will be out early next week. It has replaced our latest piece of research which will now be out the following week. In the review, we will have a look at the model portfolio and also our five small cap stock picks for the year.

This email was originally sent on Friday 11 July 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.