Top Ten Retail Investor Buys & Sells for week ending 20 April 2007

Angus Rigby, Chief Executive Officer, TD Waterhouse, commented: It’s been an interesting week on the British high street. The spell of warm weather and sunshine seems to have added a spring to the step of both UK shoppers and investors. On Tuesday, Tesco the UK’s largest retailer reported a 13% rise in full-year underlying profits to £2.55bn. With one in every three pounds spent on groceries now going to Tesco, the supermarket giant continues to attract retail investors. Shares in the group ended Tuesday trading up 1.3% or six pence to 461.75p, making it the second biggest riser on the main FTSE 100 index.

Further down the high street, it’s been a mixed bag for the clothing retailers. Debenhams in particular has felt the impact of the return to favour of M&S and Next. The balmy weather has been blamed as the reason for a lacklustre performance of the UK’s second largest department store. Debenhams issued its third profit warning since December this week and the Company said like-for-like sales fell 6.9 percent between March 4 and April 15, below its expectations, as it posted a 34.4 percent rise in first-half profit. The company comes in at the number two spot in our top ten trades of this week.

Continuing on the high street theme, there has been fevered talk about consolidation amongst the UK’s biggest retail banks. Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) shares benefited from the announcement that the Bank is interested in a three way approach for a break-up bid for ABN AMRO. This announcement came as ABN's exclusive talks with Barclays were coming to an end. Back in March RBS, the UK's second-largest banking group, reported a pre-tax profit of £9.2bn for 2006 - 16% up on the previous year.

Barclays had declared its interest in ABN AMRO last month and has until recently been in exclusive takeover talks with the Dutch bank. With the RBS consortium now declaring its hand, Barclays has had its period of exclusive talks extended. It is speculated that Barclays is only willing to go as high as 35 euros a share for ABN, while the rival consortium could afford as high as 40 euros. Barclays wants to merge its operations with ABN Amro and has even offered to move its HQ to Amsterdam, the other bid is aiming to break up the Dutch bank. Lloyds TSB shares also rose this week on speculation that it was a target for some large US banks, including Bank of America and Citigroup. Europe's biggest bank HSBC also gained on reported interest from a Saudi Arabian investor. All four UK banks were traded by our investors and feature in this week’s top ten buys and sells.


Top 10 Buys
1 Partygaming
2 Debenhams
3 Jessops
4 Vodafone
5 Imperial Energy Co
6 BP
7 Tesco
8 Barclays
9 HSBC Holdings
10 Experian Group


Top 10 Sells
1 Partygaming
2 BP
3 Lloyds TSB Group
4 Barclays
5 Vodafone
6 Jessops
7 Glaxosmithkline
8 Scottish & Southern Energy
9 Max Petroleum
10 Royal Bank of Scotland

The Top Ten buys and sells are measured as the number of trades carried out in each stock over the previous 7 days.