Friday Email: 19 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 stock market has endured a tough week as the drama in Greece plays out. The FTSE 100 had fallen over 200 points since this time last week when it fell to 6628 yesterday before recovering as the Dow jones rose 180 points. It is now trading at over 6700. In my view its as much about the usual summer blues as the Greek crisis. The economic indicators are generally supportive and companies in the main are beating expectations, certainly from a dividend perspective. The huge mining sector has been dragging the main indices down for a long time now as China has slowed and commodities prices have slumped, but other sectors have been prospering and financial services have been recovering. Overall, I am quite positive.
The past week saw some bumper dividend increases as Betfair increased their full year dividend by 70%, Crest Nicholson by 56% and Ashtead group by 33%.
The countdown is showing around 12 UK companies going ex in the coming week with Electrocomponents and Kcom yielding 3.01% and 3.59% respectively from the single dividend.
The week ahead is quiet on the corporate front as is usual at this time of the year with one of our favourite companies, Photo-Me reporting on Thursday.
Requests from members this week include Mortgage Advice Bureau which paid its maiden dividend in May and Plastics Capital (which will go into DividendMax later today)
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.
Read next: 12 June 2015
The week past saw the market falling until Wednesday worried about the talks with Greece, but then it rallied to end up fairly flat on the week. The FTSE 100 index is currently trading at around 6825. Only four dividend declarations came this week with RPC group (dividend up 12%), WS Atkins (8.1%) Oxford Instruments (4.8%) and Halma increased its full year dividend by more than 5% for the 35th consecutive year. (7% this time)