Top Ten Retail Investor Buys & Sells for week ending 18 May 2007

Angus Rigby, Chief Executive Officer, TD Waterhouse, commented: Telecoms giant BT is popular amongst TD Waterhouse customers this week after if was reported that pre-tax profits had grown by a quarter on last year. During an update to investors in Thursday’s final year results, the Company announced that £2.billion would be paid to shareholders in share buybacks thanks to growth in the broadband market with the acquisition of smaller rival PlusNet in February. BT is hoping to attract more customers to its services after launching BT Vision in late 2006, a digital TV service which is set to undercut both Sky and Virgin Media on the prices of its sports channels. Revenues from BT’s broadband business rose 28 per cent to £259 million in the fourth quarter bringing the Company’s share to just over a third of the UK market.

Meanwhile, the mining sector saw strong trading activity this week as energy giants BP and Rio Tinto unveiled plans for a joint venture scheme to generate near carbon-free electricity using "clean coal" technology. Rio Tinto’s share price is up over 25 per cent on last year, boosted in recent weeks by speculation that the world’s second largest miner could become a takeover target for BHP Billiton. The share price hit 52-week highs of 3,660p earlier this month, but after brokers downgraded the miner’s rating arguing that BHP would be unlikely to table an offer for the Company, it slipped back.

Eco-conscious BP however continues to ride the crest of our Top 10 Buy wave with its share price up one per cent on last week to 563p, despite criticism from US congressmen this week over the Company’s oil spillage at Prudhoe Bay in 2006.

Elsewhere on the markets, investor confidence in iSoft, the group behind the NHS software upgrade remains infirm. ISoft was sold to Australian software firm IBA for around £140 million despite continuing investigations by the FSA into accounting discrepancies which cost the Company £14.6m between May and October 2006. Though its share price is up by over 50 per cent on last month, the Company’s share value is still down 40 per cent on 2006, and may suffer further with reports out this week that the firm's largest customer US Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) has refused to back the IBA takeover.


Top 10 Buys
1 Partygaming
2 Royal Bank of Scotland Group
3 Barclays
4 BP
5 Easyjet
6 BT Group
7 Aviva
8 Autonomy Corp
9 Vodafone Group
10 Haike Chemical Group

Top 10 Sells
1 Partygaming
2 Rio Tinto
3 Vodafone Group
4 Easyjet
5 Jessops
6 Reuters Group
7 Royal Bank of Scotland Group
8 Isoft Group
9 Yell Group
10 HSBC Holdings

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