Friday Email: 22 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 FTSE 100 continues to trade around the 7000 level as the stock market struggles to find direction at the moment. It is up 25 points as I write however at 7040. The bank holiday looms and I for one am looking forward to it, although as happens so often, the weather does not look great which is pretty annoying as I was peering out of the office window yesterday at sunny skies in Brockenhurst. I have learnt not to get in my car in these parts when the charge is on to get to the New Forest, so a train into Lymington and possibly a ferry over to the Isle of Wight beckons. We have been very very busy here at DividendMax this past two months and things are getting even busier. I am conscious of the fact that we have not produced a research piece for a while and so Bank Holiday Monday may end up a working day for us.
Back to business and there has been a great deal of corporate activity this past week. There has been no dividend reductions, but also not very many dividend increases over 10%; the vast majority being single digit dividend increases. The double digit increases came from Babcock (10%), Renew Holdings (50%), Big Yellow (35%), Aveva (14%), Paragon (20%), Burberry (10%), QinetiQ (17%) and Booker (14%). Big Yellow and Booker both featured in our research piece on the 23rd March, so good to see them both keeping up the momentum.
The shortened week ahead sees the end of the March year-end reporting season and we enter a period of relative inactivity with only a few companies reporting including Tate & Lyle and Paypoint, who have a pretty impressive dividend track record. Still no obvious signal from the market that the sell in May strategy is underway.
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: 15 May 2015
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.
