Friday Email: 18 August 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 performed similarly to last week by having a good start to the week and falling away badly in the past two days. Overall the FTSE 100 is slightly up on the week.

In the past week corporate reporting has slowed but there was still some activity and a number of companies produced double digit dividend increases including Rank (12%), Marshalls (17%), Lookers (10%), Balfour Beatty (33%), Admiral (10%), John Menzies (11%) and Hargreaves Lansdown produced a 20% increase in its ordinary dividend but possibly signalled the end of its regular special dividends according to some commentators.

The week ahead sees BHP Billiton reporting its Final Results and we shall see if they show similar confidence to their big rival Rio Tinto when declaring their final dividend. Wednesday sees two disastrous companies for investors report to the market; Laura Ashley and Carillion (although, this is not confirmed by their website). Carillion certainly will not pay a dividend and it has to be in serious doubt as to whether Laura Ashley will pay one. We have reduced our forecast down to 0.25p and even that seems pretty hopeful after two profit warnings.

We continue to receive great feedback regarding the recent changes to the website and there is more to come.

 

This email was originally sent on Friday 18 August 2017

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.