Friday Email: 03 February 2017
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 within a narrow range this past week and is slightly down. There has been little news on the corporate front, but that changes next week as the main reporting season slowly gets underway with some sizable companies producing their final results for 2016 including BP, Smurfit Kappa, St Modwen properties, Smith & Nephew and Ashmore. There are also interim results from Dunelm and Hargreaves Lansdown.
There are no big dividends going ex in the coming week to report.
In the next month or so we will see many final dividend declarations coming in. This is an important time for the 3 dividend Optimizer calculation with many companies now moving into a Final / Interim / Final pattern as we move towards the very busy ex-dividend months of April and May.
So far this year, there is no sign of any slowdown in dividend increases across the board in spite of commentators talking in terms of UK plc's dividend cover being at historic lows. This is a bit of a one-eyed view as the article that I read in the Saturday times last week was mentioning the likes of BP and Royal Dutch Shell, which it is true, have low cover (negative in fact) at the moment. But the dividend paying universe is a lot bigger than the oil sector and it is scaremongering to suggest that dividends as a whole are in danger. If profit forecasts are to be believed both BP and Royal Dutch Shell's dividends will be covered by earnings in the 2017 financial year. It should be pointed out that there are hundreds of companies in DividendMax with dividend cover greater than 2.
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.
