Friday Email: 06 March 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 past week was a little disappointing in that we never really challenged the 7000 mark on the FTSE 100 as the jitters over the election are starting to creep in. That said lets have a look at the dividends for the past week and you have to say that income seekers must be lapping it up. We saw specials declared by Spirax-Sarco, Amlin, Hiscox (capital return), Direct line, ITV and Novae.

We saw double digit increases in their dividends from Senior, Alent, Moneysupermarket, Glencore (helped by the rising dollar), Regus, James Fisher, ITV (34%), Travis Perkins, Dignity, Greggs, 4imprint, Legal & General, 32 Red (40%), Cobham, Schroders (34%), Aviva (30%), Direct Line (30%), Alliance Trust and Pace.

The week ahead continues at a pace, albeit slower than the previous 2 weeks. As you know when stocks get to the top of the Optimizer, it generally means one of two things. The dividend is likely to be cut or reduced / the company is in trouble or the company is being undervalued by the market. Esure report this week and whilst we have mixed messages from Direct line (30% dividend increase and a special this week) and Admiral; basically Admiral's numbers were not a disaster and they just about held their dividend and their shares rose quite a bit on the day. So at 12.99% and second on the optimizer at last nights close, Esure has to be worth investigation. They are run by Peter Wood who is the king of car insurance and they report their numbers on Tuesday 10th March.

We finally got the Lloyds bank ex-dividend date and payment date. Now I am not quite sure why Aviva think are going ex-dividend on a Wednesday when everybody else has to go ex on a Thursday.

Recent additions to DividendMax requested by members include Fairpoint group, Juridica Investment Trust, 32 Red, European Assets Trust and Aberdeen Asian Smaller companies.

To be added this coming week we have Games Workshop, Clarkson and Plus 500 requested by members.

This email was originally sent on Friday 06 March 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.