Friday Email: 06 February 2015

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 continues to challenge the 6850 mark at the top of its current trading range. The newsflow appears to be getting better as Greek fears have eased and the Euro is strong this morning. The oil price has also risen, which has boosted the FTSE 100's large resources sector. The DividendMax 2015 model portfolio got a boost yesterday as Ball Corporation has made a play for Rexam. The share price is sitting well below the offer of £6.10, so it would seem that there is some way to go before it plays out fully.

The past week saw fairly flat results in terms of dividends from the oil majors, BP and BG Group and from the pharmaceutical giants Glaxo Smithkline and Astra Zeneca. Only Alumasc and St Modwen properties managed double digit increases.

The week ahead sees the reporting season start to accelerate and we see a couple of the big miners report in Rio Tinto and Anglo American. We also get numbers from technology giant ARM, engineer; Rolls Royce and healthcare group Shire. I am particularly looking forward to Rio Tinto's numbers. It will be interesting to see the effect of falling commodity prices and how much this has been / will be offset by the dramatic fall in the oil price. Oil must represent a huge input cost to a group like Rio.

We have added some more companies into DividendMax this week at the request of members including Infinis, Globo, Flybe and VP.

Talking of Globo, they produced a tremendous trading statement this week, which received a muted response from the market. We just don't seem to like technology stocks over here. Now that they have effectively relocated to Silicon Valley, they will hopefully build up their US presence quickly with the ultimate target of a NASDAQ listing.

 


This email was originally sent on Friday 06 February 2015

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.