Design your own holiday home in The Cotswolds August 14, 2014 It’s a stifling summer’s day in London and work is exhausting. You shut your eyes and imagine escaping to an idyllic rural retreat complete with picturesque villages, a smattering of good restaurants, pubs, and a vibrant social scene. You’ve effectively transported yourself to the Cotswolds. This fantasy of a tranquil home-away-from-home is what the owners [...]
Pub chain reports growth as it offers £400m bond swap deal October 22, 2013 SPIRIT Pub Company yesterday reported profit growth of six per cent to £54m in the year to 17 August, along with a plan to ask bond holders to trade in their holdings for paper with longer due dates. Spirit said the extended bonds would enable it to continue investments in its estate holdings. The firm [...]
Britain’s cheapest burger? It’s not where you might think April 30, 2014 Where can you find Britain’s cheapest average high street burger meal? If you answered McDonalds, you’re absolutely wrong. Bargain-basement burgers In fact since 2008 the price of McDonald’s Big Mac, the fast food chain’s most popular burger, has jumped by more than 30%, according to research from stockbroker Shore Capital. Having remained at £2 for [...]
Best of the Brokers for 29 May 2014 May 28, 2014 To appear in Best of the Brokers, email your research to notes@cityam.com VODAFONE Berenberg has downgraded Vodafone to “hold” from “buy”, reducing the target price to 214p from 265p as a result of higher pressure on margins and sharply reduced prospects of an offer from AT&T. The broker said that the reduction in price target [...]
Pensions, zero-hours crackdown and recall all in Queen’s speech June 3, 2014 THE QUEEN will deliver her speech to MPs and Lords in Westminster later today, detailing the government’s policy commitments for the last year of this parliament. The contents of the speech, agreed upon with the Prime Minister, have already been widely briefed, with pensions reform leading the agenda. A crackdown on zero-hours contracts will be [...]
Wearable tech: Is it set to take over the City? September 10, 2014 Imagine the end of desks, and watches that log your billing time APPLE’S move into wearable tech this week may have disappointed investors (its shares ended the day 0.4 per cent down after the grand unveiling of its unabashedly rectangular Apple Watch), but the hype surrounding the wider wearables market has hardly dampened. NPD Group [...]
London Report: Economic data puts focus on UK housing market and growth June 9, 2014 ECONOMIC data out this week is set to shine a light on the UK’s steady return to health after the recession. The Office for National Statistics will tomorrow release April’s manufacturing data, which is forecast to show a 0.3 per cent rise in output. Construction output data – also likely to show a rise for [...]
What you need to know before the open June 6, 2014 European shares are expected higher this morning, still buoyed by the action announced by the ECB yesterday, despite calls that it’s all too little, too late. In focus are nonfarm payrolls in the US, with unemployment expected to have crept up. German industrial output moved back into growth in April, confirming that the powerhouse economy [...]
Boost value by asking some simple questions May 28, 2014 DATA analytics is often painted as a purely high-tech area, with PhD graduates devising complex algorithms. According to Peter Simons, technical specialist at the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, this perception is wrong. He recently authored a report on Big Data for Chartered Global Management Accountants and he tells City A.M. how basic commercial curiosity [...]
JD Wetherspoon slams government’s tax policy as pub chain’s profits suffer October 16, 2013 THE chairman of pub chain JD Wetherspoon yesterday hit out at what he called excessive and unfair government taxes on pubs yesterday. “We believe that pubs are taxed excessively and that the government would create more jobs and receive higher levels of overall revenue, if it were to create tax parity among supermarkets, pubs and [...]