Friday Email: 08 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:
The general election has confirmed what the opinion polls were pointing to in Scotland. Complete dominance by the SNP and all that could mean for the future of the UK. Elsewhere the opinion polls were well out and at 8.09 as I write the conservatives are at 301 seats with 42 left to declare. A majority in the house is possible. The liberal democrats have suffered terribly and they need to go back to the drawing board and start again. Meanwhile, the market likes the outcome and the FTSE 100 is trading over 7000 again.
As we pointed out a few weeks ago with the Pace bid, the Americans will keep using their expensive paper and strong dollar to buy up what they perceive as bargains in the UK. This week on Thursday, it was the turn of Telecity which has been bid for by NASDAQ quoted Equinix for a mixture of cash and shares valuing the company at 1145p (899p at the close on Wednesday). Alongside Pace, we highlighted the attractions of Telecity in our latest research article reproduced below:
http://www.dividendmax.co.uk/dividend-investor-news/2540/our-latest-research-23032015
It is sad to see the continued undervaluation of Tech stocks in this country, especially when they are very good dividend payers as Pace was and Telecity could have been. Pace increased its dividend by nearly 650% between 2008 and 2014. Telecity has barely got going, having started dividend payments in 2012 and having doubled their dividend by 2014 with the promise of 20% compound growth over the next three years.
In the past week we have seen the expected dividend reduction from Sainsbury, who reduced their final dividend by a third. We had increases from Aberdeen Asset Management (up 11%), Sage (up 8%) and Imperial Tobacco (up 10%).
The week ahead is busier than we have seen over the past month or so with figures out from Diploma, ITE, Experian, Easyjet, Enterprise Inns, SABMiller, Compass, Euromoney Institutional Investor, Grainger, Marstons and Mitchell and Butler, so a big week for the breweries. The following week is very busy indeed as the March year-enders start to report.
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: 01 May 2015
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.