Top Ten Retail Investor Buys & Sells for week ending 23 November 2007

Angus Rigby, Chief Executive Officer, TD Waterhouse, commented: Northern Rock retains a strong hold over the Top Ten Trades this week, along with the rest of the financial services sector, as the stricken Newcastle mortgage lender continues to dominate market news. This week, Northern Rock and its advisers took the decision to quicken the pace on the evaluation of eight significant bid proposals. The Company is looking to whittle down potential suitors to a shortlist of three or four for final judgment as early as next week. Earlier in the week Northern Rock shareholders were told that recent bids for the Company were “materially below” the then current share price. The share price has been on a downturn turn since mid-October and drops a further 40 per cent this week on last.

Elsewhere, Braemore Resources PLC, the AIM-listed miner, appeared seventh on our customers Top Ten Sells, after announcing that it has successfully completed test-work in Western Australia for the first extraction of nickel from the BHP Leinster tailings dams. An economic evaluation of the process run together with the results of the final test-work is due to be submitted to BHP Billiton, the world’s largest mining Company, in Q1 of 2008. This week, Braemore’s share value ranged from just over 23p to 17.5p, comfortably above the 52-week lows of 6.12p, hit earlier in the year.

Meanwhile, TD Waterhouse customers chose to take profits from credit checking firm Experian this week. This comes after the introduction of a newly revised banking code set up to offer assistance to customers facing financial difficulties. Banks will be advised to tighten up their lending practices by always using credit reference agency data from companies such as Experian. The Banking Code Standards Board will implement this and other guidelines when they administer the new set of voluntary standards for the industry next year. Experian has seen a share value high of 633p this year, though this week it hovered around the 415p mark, just over 30 per cent lower than this time last year.

TD Waterhouse Top Ten Retail Investor Buys & Sells for week ending 23 November 2007

Top 10 Buys
1 Royal Bank of Scotland
2 Northern Rock
3 Barclays
4 Bradford & Bingley
5 Alliance & Leicester
6 Lloyds TSB
7 British Airways
8 Xstrata
9 Partygaming
10 HBOS

Top 10 Sells
1 Northern Rock
2 Barclays
3 Royal Bank of Scotland
4 Bradford & Bingley
5 Alliance & Leicester
6 Vodafone
7 Braemore Resources
8 Partygaming
9 Lloyds TSB
10 Experian

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