Friday Email: 19 February 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:

That was a good week with the oil price and stocks rising as investors sought to pick up risk assets at what look like very reasonable prices. The FTSE 100 rose from 5700 on Monday to just under 6000 this morning to continue the rally which began last Thursday.

The past week saw muted action on the dividend front with very little to shout about as we saw most companies hold their dividend at the prior year level and a few single digit percentage increases. However, this morning Essentra produced a 14.3% increase in its final dividend and Standard life produced its usual solid increase. This year, the same as last year, an increase of 7.8%

The week ahead sees the reporting season really take off with a very large number of companies reporting to the market. Investors eyes will be on some of the high quality companies that have been poor performers in recent times to see if they can smell a turnaround; notably BHP Billiton, Standard Chartered, John Wood and Premier Oil. On the other hand, investors that got into the housing market recovery early will be wondering how much further there is to go as Bovis Homes, Galliford Try, Howden Joinery, Barratt Developments and Rightmove all declare their latest sets of results. We also have three big banks reporting with HSBC, Lloyds Banking group and RBS. A very big week ahead.

This email was originally sent on Friday 19 February 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.