Friday Email: 15 April 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 FTSE 100 has had a good past 5 trading days rising by over 200 points on the back of a rising oil price and UK inflation rising by more than expected. On top of that we had better than expected numbers from China.

The past week has seen very good dividend increases from Walker Greenbank (25%), Epwin Group (50%) and Next fifteen by 20% in what has been a quiet week on the corporate front. Carnival declared in the US yesterday and increased by 17%, which with the currency gains on the dollar gave a second year of very good increases in the dividend for UK holders.

The week ahead continues to be relatively quiet on the corporate reporting front but there are a large number of companies going ex-dividend.

The market has a strong feel to it at the moment and the FTSE 100 is up almost 15% from the February 11th low and up 1.9% on the year. It looks like it should be a classic sell in May year with the Brexit vote looming in June, but you never can tell with the markets. The uncertainty is still definitely around as the polls keep coming in at around 50:50, but look what happened in the general election when the pollsters got it badly wrong.

Back to stocks and the oil price is holding well at its current elevated level compared to the $27 a barrel level seen earlier in the year and is up over 60% from that level. The result has seen big gains in the natural resource space which has provided the main impetus for the big rise in the FTSE 100 since February. Some of the rises have been as dramatic as the oil price rise with BHP Billiton for example up 60% from its low for the year. This has helped the model portfolio with constituents, Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and Amec Foster Wheeler making very good gains after looking disastrous for the first month of the year. Who would have though that the worst perfoming share would be Next? The model portfolio is now out performing both the FTSE 100 and the FTSE 250; the latter by a long way as the FTSE 100 is outperfoming the FTSE 250 due to its strong commodities bias.

This email was originally sent on Friday 15 April 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.

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