Top Ten Retail Investor Buys & Sells for week ending 10 August 2007

Angus Rigby, Chief Executive Officer, TD Waterhouse, commented: Analysts have homed in on the insurance sector as rumination over the protracted merger between Resolution and Friends Provident dominated market talk this week. This all-stock tie-up between the two Companies would create one of Britain's largest life insurers, though progress has been complicatedby speculation that Friends Provident has insufficient funds from its group pensions business to expand independently without a tie-up with Resolution. Details over the merger are not expected to be finalised until late October or November, giving competitors time to mount an offer.

Elsewhere in the sector Standard Life, the UK's fifth-largest listed life insurer, reported a healthy 45% rise in UK life and pensions sales in the six months to the end of June, thanks to the growth in popularity of self-invested personal pensions (Sipps) sales. Standard Life's share price has been bolstered by this recent good performance and is up by more than 27 per cent year on year. TD Waterhouse investors took the opportunity to take profits and the stock reached number nine in our sells list.


TD Waterhouse Top Ten Retail Investor Buys & Sells for week ending 10 August 2007

Top 10 Buys
1 Royal Bank of Scotland
2 BP
3 Northern Rock
4 Tanfield Group
5 Partygaming
6 Lloyds TSB Group
7 Barclays
8 Carter & Carter
9 Xstrata PLC
10 Skyepharma


Top 10 Sells
1 Vodafone Group
2 Royal Bank of Scotland
3 Partygaming
4 Barclays
5 Tanfield Group
6 Lloyds TSB Group
7 Carter & Carter
8 Northern Rock
9 Standard Life
10 GlaxoSmithKline

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