Top Ten Retail Investor Buys & Sells for week ending 13 July 2007

Angus Rigby, Chief Executive Officer, TD Waterhouse, commented: Today’s superstition and this week’s weather have done little to dampen investors spirits as trading activity remained strong across a number of sectors. GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has been popular with TD Waterhouse investors this week despite being stumped by rival drug company Takeda, and its diabetes pill Actos which may not have the heart-attack risk linked to GlaxoSmithKline's Avandia. Shares in GSK have slipped by over 15 per cent this year on last, falling to yearly lows of 1,282p this week as fears continued to flow over the drug’s link to the incidence of heart problems in patients. Long term investors in Europe’s biggest drug maker will be looking to asthma medicine Seretide for potential after it received a license extension from European regulators to prescribe to lung disease patients.

Elsewhere, Vodafone is sold heavily by our customers this week despite a soaring share price with stock up by almost 40 per cent year on year, hitting 52-week highs of 167.80p in recent weeks. Long-term investors remain upbeat on the group after it was signalled that it was considering investing in a mobile phone operator in Vietnam as part of its expansion in the emerging markets.

Lloyds TSB profits this week from Citigroup’s broker recommendation which praised the Company for not busying itself with time-consuming M& A activity or pursuing aggressive growth in an environment where hiked interest rates dominate. The share price fluctuated at the end of this week as traders cited market talk of possible interest from Singapore state-owned investment firm Temasek. Though investor interest appears divided on the stock, many of our customers ignored market scepticism that UK banks have lost their appeal in view of rising interest rates and bought strongly into Lloyds this week.

In the retail sector, Tesco attracted investors and unwanted criticism from both green activists and the Competitions Commission for unfairly stockpiling land for future supermarket developments. The UK’s biggest supermarket is believed to own at least half of the free land holdings for supermarkets in the UK. Separately, Friends of the Earth launched an online anti-Tesco advertising campaign, urging the public to support small, independent retailers. The share price lifted by 3 per cent on last week, confounding June’s British Retail Consortium figures out this week which reported weaker food sales and a tough trading climate in the UK.

Top 10 Buys
1 Glaxosmithkline
2 Lloyds TSB Group
3 Royal Bank of Scotland
4 Tanfield Group
5 BHP Billiton
6 Partygaming
7 Northern Rock
8 Tesco
9 Carter & Carter
10 Vodafone


Top 10 Sells
1 Partygaming
2 BP
3 Vodafone Group
4 Lloyds TSB Group
5 Royal Bank of Scotland
6 Tesco
7 Tanfield Group
8 Barclays
9 BT Group
10 Experian Group

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