Friday Email: 06 April 2018

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 continued to recover this week as it makes a good start to Q2 after the difficult Q1 and is up approximately 100 points over the past three and a bit days.

According to Citigroup's recent assessment of the UK stock market "On the back of their "significant" de-rating, with the worst performance out of 67 markets year-to-date, Citi analysts say UK shares now offer an attractive value proposition, cushioned by an equity risk premium of roughly 6%. Indeed, during the last 20 years, UK shares' dividend yield, now at 4%, has only been higher in 2008-09 and the gap between the dividend and bond yield has only been wider on two prior occasions, they said, during WWI and WWII."

The shortened week has been very quiet with only a handful of companies that we cover reporting to the market. Next Fifteen and Walker Greenbank both increased their full year dividend, by 20% and 21% respectively.

The week ahead also features very few companies that we cover reporting to the market with retailers to the fore; Tesco should confirm that it is on track to recover reputation and we expect a final dividend of approximately 2p. WH Smith's dividend growth slowed last year to 10% and we expect that to continue to be the rate of increase this year. Other companies reporting include Card Factory, Belvoir Lettings, McCarthy & Stone, Hostelworld, Central Asia Metals, Eddie Stobart Logistics and Epwin group.

Going ex-dividend this coming Thursday with dividends yielding over 2% we have esure (4.5%), STV (3.8%), ITV (3.7%), Chesnara (3.4%), SSP Group (3.3%), International Personal Finance (3.3%), Vesuvius (2.2%), BBA Aviation (2.2%) and Costain for 2%.

This email was originally sent on Friday 06 April 2018

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.