Friday Email: 31 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:
The FTSE 100 has traded fairly flat this week and is around the 7350 mark, below the all time highs, but holding up well so far after what looked like a correction setting in last week.
The past week has been much quieter than recent weeks but we still saw some very good dividend increases with Polypipe leading the way, increasing their dividend by 29.5%; Mortgage Advice Bureau increased by 27%, S&U by 19.7% and Saga by 18.1%.
The week ahead slows further with very little in the way of company reporting. However, following the reporting season we get a large number of companies going ex-dividend this coming Thursday. Those yieding more than 2% from the single dividend include Pearson (5.09%), Berendsen (3.02%), John Wood (2.34%), Aviva (3.01%), Standard Life (3.75%), Chesnara (3.61%), Vesuvius (2.17%), 888 holdings (4.65%), Moneysupermarket (2.12%), BBA Aviation (2.4%) and finally Lloyds Banking (3.3%).
The EU regulators on Wednesday blocked the proposed merger between Deutsche Bourse and the London Stock Exchange, a move that was signalled by the latter company some weeks back. The merger was immediately cancelled and so was the special dividend that would have been paid to LSE shareholders. This was replaced by an equivalent amount on-market share buyback of £200 million.
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.
Read next: 24 March 2017
The market has endured a difficult week after UK inflation numbers prompted some to fear a rise in UK interest rates was imminent. The gloom over this was not helped by the murders that occurred at Westminster on Wednesday. Added to this, the markets were at all time highs, so to many investors, it probably felt like a good time to take some profits. As a result, we are down 100 points on the week which actually is not too bad at all given all of the above.
