Friday Email: 16 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 fallen about 60 points this week and after a good start to September in now down on the month. 

The past week has seen good dividend increases from Central Asia Metals (22%), Galliford Try (21%) and Dunelm (16.7%). The Next figures disappointed the market although they did manage to increase EPS very slightly due to share buybacks. They held their interim dividend at last years level. It was good to see Galliford perform so well. The market still seems suspicious and they are still very high on the Optimizer in spite of rising over 50% since we mentioned them in early July. The yield on the final dividend alone is almost 5% and they go ex on the 27th October.

The week ahead is quiet and the market has that September feeling of wanting to go down. There are a good number of quality stocks currently on my watchlist that are beginning to look very good value, but it is probably too early to mention them yet. It never ceases to amaze me how far poor sentiment can drive down share prices.

Overall however, as we head towards the final quarter, the investment case through the yield gap between bonds and equities still leaves equities looking decent value. The much higher yield from Equities should limit any downside, but there are always unforseen short term events that can hit equity markets hard. These will create excellent opportunities to pick up quality at distressed prices.

This email was originally sent on Friday 16 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.

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