Friday Email: 04 March 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 markets have continued their recent strength this week with the FTSE 100 up over 100 points this week and the FTSE 250 up almost 350 points by the close of play on Thursday. It has been a big week for reporting as is the case at this time of the year and the dividend picture remains very good overall. I am still worried about the uncertainty surrounding Brexit, however the fundamentals seem sound in most cases.

The past week saw double digit increases from Dignity (10%), RPS (the usual 15%, which has now occured for the past 22 years), Domino's Pizza (18.6%), Senior (10%), Travis Perkins (15.8%), Schroders (12%), Jupiter Fund management (29%), Greggs (30%), Regus (13%), McColls (20%), Admiral (16%), Arrow Global (39.4%) Moneysupermarker.com (14%), ITV (27.6%), Novae (10%), Synthomer (10%), Clinigen (18%), WPP (17%), London Stock Exchange (20%) and Costain (15.7%).

It was also a good week for special dividends on top of the ordinary dividends with ITV, Direct Line, Greggs, Elementis and Novae all declaring specials.

Barclays shocked the market (and us) by effectively halving its dividend for the next two years. It paid heavily with a 10% fall in its shares on the day.

The week ahead sees a continued high level of activity and we could see maiden dividends for both Worldpay and Equiniti who both had their IPO's this past year. Other companies that we cover reporting to the market are Dialight, 4imprint, Prudential, SIG, Michael Page, Savills, Cineworld, 32Red, Ibstock, Amec Foster Wheeler, Old Mutual, Coputacenter and JD Wetherspoons.

After pointing out HSBC last week one of our members highlighted that he was receiving very good dividends from PLUS 500 who will pay an ordinary dividend of 22.59p and a special of 25.99p at the current Euro / Pound rate with both dividends going ex on March 24th. That is a total of 48.58p against last nights closing price of 606p.

We wrote an article for the Motley Fool yesterday and this can be found here http://www.fool.co.uk/investing/2016/03/03/dividends-of-the-day-16-jump-at-admiral-group-plc-39-hike-at-arrow-global-group-plc/

This email was originally sent on Friday 04 March 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.