Friday Email: 13 May 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 market is flat over the past 5 trading days and remains down on the year and it does have a bad feeling about it. Valuations look attractive but there is a nagging feeling that there are more falls to come. General economic malaise and the fear of the Brexit vote still hangs over the market.
In the past week Easyjet produced solid interim results and announced an increase in its payout ratio from 40% to 50% which will lead to a 25% increase in the dividend this year. The Questor column advised investors to sell as it predicted a period of cyclical overcapacity lies ahead. ITV also produced good Q1 results and the market punished them. Fears over the NAR figures look well overblown to me and I look forward to further double digit growth in revenues and profits in the current financial year. As Warren Buffet always says, you look for good management and in that regard the ITV management have made the right call in moving away from advertising revenue and into quality content production which continues to grow strongly.
On the dividend declarations front things still look good with dividend increases easily outweighing falls; the only reduction coming from Vedanta and that was to be expected given the markets that they operate in.
The week ahead is much busier with a number of heavyweights reporting to the market including National Grid, SSE, Burberry, SABMiller, British Land, Land Securities and ICAP.
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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Read next: 06 May 2016
It has been a bad week for the markets with the FTSE 100 falling over 200 points and the FTSE 250 over 400 points. There is now a mounting fear about the state of the UK economy and this has manifested itself strongly in the retail sector where sales on the high street fell last month by the most since the financial crisis. Brexit uncertainty looms large over the markets but it still remains 3 to 1 against on Betfair. The market has opened well down again this morning and sub 6000 is looming once again as fear is starting to creep in. The FTSE 100 is now down on the year again. It looks like sell in May has come quickly this year and the market is starting to look good value across the board.
