Friday Email: 10 March 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:
Another week with little movement on the FTSE 100 as it continues to flirt with all time highs but has failed to kick on decisively. It is currently trading at 7347.
Companies continue to report decent profits generally with strong performances this past week coming from Spirax Sarco, 4imprint, Hill & Smith, Ibstock, XL Media, Abcam and Synthomer. In most cases dividend declarations were in line with what was expected.
The week ahead sees a slow down from the very busy past three weeks from a reporting perspective. Declared dividends going ex next week with a single dividend payout of over 2% include British American tobacco (2.32%), Crest Nicholson (3.32%), Essentra (2.63%), Hammerson (2.36%), Direct Line (2.85%), XL Media (2.93%) and Low & Bonar (2.94%).
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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Read next: 03 March 2017
The FTSE 100 has had a good week and is up about 100 points and touched a new all time high on Wednesday. My bullish stance on the market remains intact in spite of politicians and Brexit. However, playing the scenarios game, which is important for investors, especially in the short term; is becoming increasingly difficult. We still have no idea what Brexit actually means, so that is a lot of 'what ifs' unanswered. The Bank Of England is going to be in a right pickle if the pound stays this low with imported inflation and dollar based commodity prices also coming into the RPI food chain. Now that the nation is hooked on low interest rates, can they really whack them up to fight inflation? Would it actually work and what a lot of pain it would cause to the economy. How high could rates go? Not very and that is unlikely to attract investors to the pound, especially as the next move in the US for interest rates is likely to be upwards and fairly soon if the markets are to be believed meaning more dollar strength. So, it seems to me that the Bank Of England is going to have little choice but to let inflation go to some extent, at least whilst the markets and companies and investors get their heads truly around Brexit. They can get away with this for a short while because inflation has been very low for some time.
