Friday Email: 05 June 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 has had a bad week falling over 200 points and is now trading well below 7000. The summer blues seem to have kicked in and the same stories we have been hearing for some time are doing the rounds again. Most prominent at the moment is that the market is falling on Greek woes. What I see from the past week is dividend increases from the companies reporting. Synergy health were not going to pay a dividend due to the takeover situation. OPG produced good numbers and will deliver fantastic results over the next two financial years with its new operational capacity fully onstream. A dividend is sure to come next year. Of the rest Kcom continued its 10% per year increase strategy, VP Group increased by 18%, Johnson Matthey by 9% and Halfords continued to rebuild and rebalance its dividend in line with cash flows delivering a 15.4% increase. London Metric Properties did not increase its annual dividend, but did throw in a decent special dividend.

The week ahead sees another fair amount of companies going ex-dividend, such as Vodafone. Around about 20% of the FTSE 100 goes ex-dividend between now and the end of July which adds a slight downward effect to the market over the summer. Adding to the downward effect is the lack of corporate news with only four companies that we cover reporting this week namely Oxford Instruments, First Group, Halma and WS Atkins. There are no really big dividends going ex this week. Vodafone and London Metric (with its special) both yield over 3% from this weeks list.

Now is the time of the year to set up your watch lists or at least monitor your existing watch list closely as the market could give you an opportunity to pick up some bargains, especially if the market becomes irrational over Greece.

High on the Optimizer right now are Infinis Energy which we mentioned last week, Raven Russia for obvious reasons and Polar Capital wich has been suffering big outflows in AUM in Japan. The next three; GVC, Kcom and SSE all look pretty safe to me. We have removed Plus 500 after the bid from Playtech.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This email was originally sent on Friday 05 June 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.

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