Friday Email: 23 October 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 past week has seen the FTSE 100 trade in a narrow 120 point range. We are currently at the top end of it with a strong finish to the week. We saw another good dividend increase from Whitbread of 13.1% and one of our newcomers, Aeorema Communications declared a final dividend of 3p when the shares were trading at 38p.
The week ahead continues to be quiet with little in the way of dividend declarations, but there are plenty of companies going ex-dividend including Barratt who will pay an ordinary dividend and a special dividend with a combined yield of over 3%.
Lok'nstore Group, B.P. Marsh & Partners and Aeorema Communications has been added as part of the process of achieving full coverage.
Trifast and Japan Residential Investment Company Ltd have been requested to be added in by members.
One of our members asked me about the takeover by Terra Firma of Infinis and whether or not it will be worth waiting for the dividend. I suspect that they will not pay the dividend and I also doubt that a counter offer will be made, so we sold them in the trading portfolio on the day of the bid. I am bullish of the market and suspect that the opportunity cost of holding for the dividend or a higher offer could be wasteful. We have cut our dividend forecasts for infinis to zero.
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: 16 October 2015
The past week saw the FTSE 100 give up a modest amount of the recent gains. It has fallen about 20 points this week. We saw another very good set of results from Bellway who we highlighted a while back. It is now up around 50% since then and with it came a 48% increase in the dividend this week. Three of the new additions to DividendMax this week produced very good dividend increases with Dot Digital up by 80%, Next Fifteen up by 20% and Walker Greenbank up by 25.7%. WH Smith carried on their very good track record with a 13% increase and the announcement of further buybacks very simliar to the Next model.
