Friday Email: 22 July 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 past week has seen the FTSE 100 trade in a narrow range with little in the way of corporate news from a reporting perspective.

The week ahead sees the interim reporting season begin in earnest with a good number of companies reporting to the market including ITV, Glaxo, Relx, Smith & Nephew, Royal Dutch Shell, BAE, Rolls Royce, BAT, Astra Zeneca, GKN, Man group, Dignity and many others.

I will be watching ITV closely as they have been hit hard by being perceived as Bremain stock. However, they do have considerable overseas earnings with more than half of the ITV studios revenues coming from the US (approx 30%) and ROW. It is the advertising revenues that will be scrutinised however and their comments about how Brexit will affect their business. I have noticed the standard comment from Bremain stocks has been something of the ilk 'It is too early to ascertain the effects of Brexit on our business'

Ashtead is finally starting to come up to my expectations and has risen sharply since it fell to a 52 week low of 769p. It is now at its 52 week high for a gain of over 50%. All of those analysts who downgraded are looking like they got it wrong. It remains the largest holding in the trading portfolio.

On the 12th February Friday email, we mentioned that ARM in spite of superb results and a very positive outlook were trading at a 52 week low (848p) and that this was a great opportunity to buy quality at knockdown prices. It seems that the Japanese agree as they offer double that with a bid for ARM on Monday at 1700p. I can see this happening more and more as long as the pound remains weak.

Finally from the FT:

Investors in UK companies are heading for a dividend windfall as the collapse in sterling following the Brexit vote boosts payouts in dollars and euros. Exchange rate gains will lift paouyts by £4.3 billion this year, offsetting a slew of dividend cuts earlier in 2016, according to the Capita UK Dividend Monitor - Financial Times.

New into DividendMax this week we have DFS furniture.

 

This email was originally sent on Friday 22 July 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.