Friday Email: 15 January 2021
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 is down approximately 100 points on the week.
The past week has seen very little in the way of company reporting and dividend declarations. There has been a large number of trading statements however. These have been mixed from sector to sector with those sectors most affected by the Covid restrictions clearly faring the worst. It is interesting to see how much debt reduction is occuring across companies as covid measures (including non payment of dividends) has resulted in stronger balance sheets. An example of this is Hays the recruitment specialist who suffered a 20% drop in net fees as a result of the pandemic. They will make a small profit by their normal standards of around £25 million. Their net cash position from December 2019 through December 2020 has risen from £13.2 million to £380 million.
More generally, investors continue to pin their hopes on the rapid roll out of the various vaccines and most investors are expecting a strong recovery in the second half of 2021.
The two weeks ahead are also quiet from a reporting perspective and as we move into February the main reporting season begins.
There are no companies going ex this Thursday with yields over 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.
Read next: 08 January 2021
The FTSE 100 has made a very strong start to the year and has risen by 6.2% in the past 5 days in spite of the further lockdown and events in the US capital that shocked the world. Investors are pinning their hopes on the success of the vaccines in the battle against Covid and the rebound in the world economy that will follow.
