Friday Email: 01 May 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:

It is May day and the general election looms with the polls suggesting no overall clear winner for the 56th UK parliament so another coalition is on the cards. According to the Telegraph investors have been pulling money out of the UK over the past couple of months and moving it into Europe as a result of uncertainty about the political landscape following the general election. The FTSE 100 hit 7120 on Tuesday afternoon but has since fallen 170 points to below the 7000 level and is 6922 in current market trading. This is probably more due to the US markets being jittery over US interest rates than the general election uncertainty. The Dow Jones fell 200 points yesterday.

The past week saw another very good set of numbers from Whitbread and a 19.4% increase in the full year dividend taking its dividend from 30.25p to 82.15p in the years 2006 to 2014. Impressive and cheaper than Associated British foods who we looked at last week on a forward multiple of 22x compared to ABF's 27x. ABF have grown their dividend from 18p to 34p in the 2006 to 2014 time period. Globo reported another excellent set of numbers yesterday and was rewarded with a 10% rise in the share price on the day.

2015 Model portfolio constituent Saga reported yesterday and produced good numbers. It is now up 23% on the year and they declared a maiden dividend of 4.1p which is slightly higher than the level mentioned in their IPO documentation.

The week ahead sees the election on May 7th, which makes for an interesting week. On the corporate front things remain subdued but we see final results from Sainsbury on Wednesday and BT Group on Thursday. There are also interim results from Sage (Wednesday) and Imperial Tobacco (Thursday).

This time next week we will know the result of the general election, but we probably will not know who is in power.

 

This email was originally sent on Friday 01 May 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.