Friday Email: 12 August 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 hit a 12 month high this morning at 6915. The eqyuties markets continue to be strong with the weak pound and very low interest rates driving the market up.

The past week did not produce any notable dividend increases with the exception of Hastings who are setting the post IPO dividend levels with the yield at just over 4%.

The week ahead is quieter with Bovis Homes, BHP Billiton and old favourite Admiral all reporting.

Meanwhile, ITV which is one of my favourite companies at the moment based upon their great management and my belief that Brexit will not impact them as much as the market is factoring in; announced that they had made an offer to buy Entertainment One for about a billion quid. I hope they do not go above 300p. The current offer is 236p. I worked out a month or so ago that anything below 250p would be earnings accretive. With synergies and ITV's financial muscle, which will lead to finance savings, I can cope with up to 300p. It would lead to a re-rating of the company as the rebalancing act that management have been executing would be largely complete.  Anything above 300p and they have probably overpaid.

New into DividendMax this week at the request of a member we have Lavendon. As I have said in the past our members are very shrewd investors and in this particular case I am struggling to find any downside with a PE of 6 and a yield of over 5%. They issued a trading statement recently that was encouraging and their interim numbers are out on the 26th August.

This email was originally sent on Friday 12 August 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.