Shares in Standard Life Aberdeen are sharply lower this morning after Lloyds Banking Group announced it would terminate a contract with the asset manager held with its Scottish Widows business. The two sides had previously reached agreement that the contract, worth £109bn, would not be terminated for a six month period after the merger of…
Shares in both BT and Sky are higher this morning, the latter strongly outperforming the former after the latest Premier League rights auction results were announced. Sky is the clear winner, seeing its average cost per game falling 16% from £11.1m to £9.3m and picking up a further two games per season from 2019-22 to…
TUI tops the UK’s blue-chips this morning as investors welcome a Q1 report card (Oct-Dec) showing revenues +8.1% YoY, a narrower seasonal net loss and significantly improved underlying profitability. Shareholders are comforted by strong demand for Holidays in the Northern and Central regions, summer already 35% sold (in-line) and continued improvement in destinations such as…
Acacia Mining shares are sharply offside this morning after announcing it will cut its 2017 dividend as its ongoing battle with the Tanzanian government over exports leads to further detrimental financial impacts. Almost a year on from the announcement of the export ban imposed by the African state’s government, and with no resolution yet reached,…
9 Feb Interactive Investor (Link) “UK Index Utilities remains a sector under extreme pressure, down another 1% this morning and underperforming the wider market, failing to display the defensive attributes that would normally have one rushing to their safe revenue, profit and dividend streams. Especially during a market volatility storm such as that which we were…
There has been much talk about volatility and this week’s more than tripling of the VIX Index, a measure of near-term volatility expectations for the US stock market (the S&P500 Index to be precise). However, while most of the talk is about this being a bad thing, taking equities into correction territory, down 10% from highs,…