Friday Email: 29 August 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 market has been quite strong in August and has risen to challenge the great wall that is 6850 on the FTSE. We believe that it will be breached in the not too distant future and that an all time high on the FTSE 100 is well overdue in keeping with the performance seen on the US indicies.
The week ahead is very quiet on the corporate fromnt, but we can look forward to speculation that the worlds greatest company, Apple, will launch a new product. This has helped one of our small cap picks for the year, Imagination Technologies, perform very well this past week. I still hold out a small hope that Toumaz could be involved in the iWatch, but it is looking increasingly unlikely.
Importantly, our favourite company, Cathay International reports today, but they usually report after the close of the Hong Kong market which will be after this update, or at the same time at least so I will not be able to comment on the results. The share price of China Hutchinson Medicom never ceases to amaze me given that Cathay is a similar story.
BHP billiton have taken a tonking and it is not really obvious to me why. In our view they represent a very sound long term investment in the mining sector and they have an excellent dividend track record even through the recession.
The Tesco strory just gets worse. Two years ago they were a dividend champion and one of only a handful of companies in the UK with a 25 year CADI. Today they announced a dividend cut of 75% at the interim stage. Ouch.
The past week has seen some very good dividend increases notably from Unite and Raven Russia, still performing in spite of the situation in the Ukraine. Other good increases came from Computacenter and Restaurant Group, who both reported this morning. Also Playtech, Xaar, 888 holdings and Regus produced double digit increases.
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: 22 August 2014
The past week has seen the markets pick up and August is suddenly not looking so bad as the FTSE 100 has risen 40 points on the month so far; not that we have seen much in the way of dividend growth from companies reporting. We did see a massive rise from Bovis Homes of 200% which takes it back to what it was paying pre financial crisis and John Wood Group did not disappoint with a solid 25% dividend increase. BHP increased its dividend by 4% and Glencore by 11%. High yielding Phoenix group which is top of the Optimizer for UK stocks maintaned its dividend at 26.7p whilst reducing debt considerably making future returns from dividends look pretty safe.
