Friday Email: 28 October 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 for some time now and currently sits just below 7000. The market has opened down this morning as we wait for US GDP numbers later today.

The past week was quiet from a reporting perspective. Bombed out ITV managed to get over going ex-dividend yesterday and the shares actually went up 4p as well. Their third quarter results on the 10th November will make interesting reading. At the moment with the bid for Time Warner by AT&T, they look like a bid target, most probably from a dollar source with Liberty already holding 10% of the equity.

The week ahead remains quiet but it will be interesting to see what Berkeley Group have to say with their interims on Monday. The house builders have been hammered since the Brexit vote, but have shown little signs of a slowdown. They have rapidly rebuilt their ordinary dividends back to pre financial crisis levels and in some cases to much more than that. The Prime Minister is committed to building more homes and housing fundamentals still appear to be sound with a chronic shortage of supply and a continuing very low interest rate environment. The share price woes of the sector was demonstrated by Barratt yesterday who went ex-dividend and the shares fell by 10% at one point. Because investors hate uncertainty and nobody actually knows what Brexit means, their share prices will remain under a cloud for some time, but their valuations are already pricing in a pretty miserable scenario.

This email was originally sent on Friday 28 October 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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