Friday Email: 08 January 2016

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 UK Stock Market has made a very bad start to the year with both the FTSE 100 and the FTSE 250 well down since January 4th. The FTSE 100 began the year at 6242 and is now 5975, down 4.3%. The FTSE 250 began the year at 17441 and is now 16826, down 3.5%. The main causes of this are the weakness of the Chinese economic data and the collapse of the oil price.

The past week saw Next give a disappointing trading update (albeit profits were within guidance) and deliver a special dividend of 60p per share. Its shares fell below its share buyback level and the company wasted no time in going into the market and has bought back about 1.4 million shares for immediate cancellation. Easyjet announced lower load factors due to the Paris atrocity, but overall passenger numbers were up on this time last year.

The week ahead continues to be quiet with very little in the way of corporate news.

This week we published our DividendMax 2016 model portfolio with the usual mixed results that you can expect from a portfolio after a week of trading. It is down 3.1% so far. It can be found at www.dividendmax.co.uk

New into DividendMax we have NCC Group, Ibstock, Hastings, Renewables Infrastructure, Worldpay, Porvair, SThree and Shoe Zone who have their final results in the coming week.

One of our favourite companies; Photo-Me made a very encouraging trading statement this morning on the back of the new Japanese 'My number cards' which will result in a material uplift to profit expectations for the full year.

This email was originally sent on Friday 08 January 2016

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.