Friday Email: 09 September 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 traded in a narrow range this week and has made little progress. It is currently trading at around 6845.

The past week saw the housebuilders continue to pay big dividends as Barratt increased their dividend by 19% and Redrow by 67%. Double digit increases of 10% came from both Genus and Plus 500.

Way back last year we mentioned Ashtead and were feeling a little sheepish as multiple analysts downgraded the stock to a sell and reduced their price targets. The share price hit a lowly 769p, but we maintained our conviction that they would continue to reward shareholders with bumper dividend increases due to their high cover. On Wednesday, they announced solid Q1 results and the shares rose to a record 1360p before succombing to profit taking. They are currently 1273p and they still look reasonable value.

The week ahead sees a large number of companies going ex-dividend with the big Special from Carr's Group of over 11%. Beware though that they have sold a big chunk of their business to pay for this Special dividend. Other notable dividends going ex this coming Thursday include RPS, Centaur Media and Molins. On the reporting front, it will be interesting to see how Next are doing and another good dividend payer from the retail space, Dunelm.

New into DividendMax this week we have Smurfit Kappa, CYBG, Metro Bank, Cmc Markets and Ascential. Don't get carried away however, these are not member requests and several of these companies have never paid a dividend. These entries are to satisfy the FTSE reshuffles.

New into DividendMax at the request of members we have two more companies that do not pay dividends namely Velocys and Avanti Comms.

This email was originally sent on Friday 09 September 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.