Friday Email: 15 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 market has been volatile this past week and saw sharp falls on Tuesday as the equity markets fell in reaction to worries about Greece and a sell off in global bond markets. There has been a mild recovery since then and the FTSE 100 is sitting just below 7000. It is sell in May time though and you wonder if, with the removal of the election uncertainty, the old adage will persevere this year. Personally, I am pretty bullish about the markets between now and the end of the year.
In the week past there was a decent dividend increase from Compass of over 11% which was welcome. The stumble in Easyjet was an excuse for traders to take profits. They were at a level that valued them fairly and any short term weakness due to the French air traffic control strike could be seen by investors as an opportunity to look at this very well run company again. As a model portfolio constituent, it was disappointing to see such an adverse reaction on the back of a one-off situation, but it still remains up on the year. Another model portfolio constituent fared very well this week as TalkTalk was up nearly 6% on Thursday to record a 27.5% increase in the year so far. Other than that, there were no shocks and most companies either held their dividend or produced modest increases; below 10%.
The week ahead is very busy with around 40 companies reporting including a good number of FTSE 100 heavyweights including Babcock, Vodafone, Royal Mail, Land Securities, Burberry, Marks and Spencer, SSE, National Grid and United Utilities.
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: 08 May 2015
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.