4049 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith is again proving that he is still alive with another guest post. Robert started his City career the year before I was born and is, I think, 157 years old. Fear not. He is very much alive and kicking. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at AstraZeneca. RSS writes:
The new CEO of Astra Zeneca Pascal Soirot (which scans with Hercule Poirot very nicely) made his promised presentation on the strategy for returning the company to profits and earnings growth on Thursday 21 March. He appeared to do that with some degree of credibility because the share price was marked up the next day. I am also delighted to see that along with the presentation on how he plans to get profits growing he had a comment on dividends. Basically, the company says that ordinary dividends will not be an automatic function of an individual year’s earnings but rather will reflect expectations about growth. I think it is worth a direct quote
4082 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. Robert is a speaker at the UKInvestor Show on April 13th. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at Drax.
So that old fashioned (in scale) and very British (Yorkshire) non global business of supplying the 7% of the UK’s electricity has, as part of the price of converting half its highly efficient coal fired electricity generation capacity, to the generation of electric power from biomass – mainly imported, fast growing replaceable timber – is off the stock market’s higher end dividend tariff. Before its results for last year to 31st December 2012, on a then share price of 609p, the published dividend yield for Drax (DRX) was 4.3%. That was then this is now.
4101 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at National Grid.
A couple of weeks ago I advocated a purchase of National Grid (NG.) shares for dividend yield. This week the company published its interim management statement for the period 1 October 2012 to 28 January 2013. It seems that my reading of the runes were pretty much correct. Regulatory management is shown to be going according to plan and shows no obvious signs of not moving into an expected new dance like embrace of mutual understanding and agreement between the regulator and company for the years following 2013.
4109 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years at t1ps.com . He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. He is a great one for focussing on yield. RSS today looks at AstraZeneca.
Astra Zeneca (AZN) is not as other pharmaceutical companies are: or rather, it was not as other pharmaceuticals are! Until last year, Astra Zeneca was operating a singular business model in which it sought to reduce R&D costs by outsourcing much of it in collaborative deals with outside companies. That left it, in theory at least, to simply generate cash with which to pay shareholders dividends or buy back their shares. The City did not buy that model and the shares sunk to a level where the yield was phenomenal. Change was needed and now, under new management, it is returning to being a more orthodox ‘big pharma’ which by convention, does a significant quantity of its molecule discovery, research and development in house – incurring the costs of such activity.
4117 days ago
Robert Sutherland Smith started his City career the year before I was born. He is, I think, 157 years old. He and I have worked together for almost eight years. at t1ps. He is my friend and he is a very funny and intelligent chap. He is now branching out to celebrate his 158th by doing some freelance writing over at TradingResearchPoint on FTSE 350 Income stocks. He is a great one for focussing on yield. He is also going to do a monthly column for me on this blog on the subject that really interests him, life on Hampstead Heath. I am sure we all look forward to “Pond Life.” RSS today looks at HSBC.
see reports that US Mega bank JP Morgan has this week been taken to task by regulators for its lax internal controls. For those of us who remember when banks used to be in institutions that lent money and were considered safe and dull this serves as yet another reminder that those banks with a real advantage in the new regulatory world are those with a culture for what used to be called ‘probity’; the principal stock in trade of London’s ‘joint stock’ clearing banks for much of the last century.Barclays, under its new management, in a neo-Darwinian instinct for adaptation to the new conditions
