Friday Email: 16 December 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 had a reasonably good week and is up about 70 points. At the open this morning it is trading above 7000.  

The past week has been very quiet. Micro Focus stood out with a 75% increase in its interim dividend, which resulted in an upgrade to its final dividend.

Sky were bid for by 21st Century Fox and this has given a boost to ITV, who look vulnerable in spite of a very good track record over the past 5 years which has seen them double their profits.

Lavendon, as we expected received another bid and then a counter bid, with another one coming in this morning from Loxam at 250p per share in cash. They have now more than doubled since they were first highlighted by one of our members at 109p. The market is expecting more as they are currently trading at 257p.

The week ahead is the quietest week of the year in terms of dividend declarations with no companies reporting.

New into DividendMax this week to complete the BATS indices we have Polypipe, Ricardo, Safestore, Sanne, SSP, Helical and Tyman.

This email was originally sent on Friday 16 December 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.