Top Ten Retail Investor Buys & Sells for week ending 28 November 2007

Angus Rigby, Chief Executive Officer, TD Waterhouse, commented: The financial services sector has seen a surge of investor activity in the last week with Northern Rock continuing to be a central focus. Monday kicked off with the announcement from the Northern Rock board that Sir Richard Branson's Virgin consortium was the preferred bidder for the stricken mortgage lender. The battle intensified the following day when John Wood’s SRM Hedge Fund, the largest stakeholder, substantially increased its stake in a bid to force the board to reconsider its decision. This news rallied the share price in the Company up 40 per cent this week on last, halting the downturn which began in mid-October.

Meanwhile, customers of TD Waterhouse, last night 's winner of the Best online broker award for 2007 with Shares magazine, chose to take profits from mortgage lender Alliance & Leicester (A& L) this week as it appeared sixth on our Top 10 Sells. Yesterday’s trading statement reported sub-prime write downs which were lower than many had first feared, with news that profit would be ahead of the £598m consensus of analysts’ forecasts. The share value opened on Thursday morning at 691.50p, up on Wednesday’s close value of 635.50p. Similarly, rival lender Bradford & Bingley (B& B) saw its shares open 5 per cent higher after reassurances that it would meet pre-tax profit forecasts. This week, B& B’s share value has ranged from over 260p to 320p, marginally above this year’s low of 254p.

Elsewhere, Jarvis, the infrastructure support services group, was popular amongst our customers, entering in at fifth place on our Top 10 Buys. This week, it announced interim results for the half year ending 30 September 2007 and reporting losses at the pre-tax stage of £0.6m excluding exceptional charges of £2.7m. However, our customers were boosted by the group’s optimism over prospects in the rail renewal business and increased their exposure to the stock this week. Jarvis has seen a share value high of 87p in the last year although the current share value of 18.75p is much closer to its 52-week low of 18.25p.

TD Waterhouse Top Ten Retail Investor Buys & Sells for week ending 28 November 2007

Top 10 Buys
1 Northern Rock
2 Royal Bank of Scotland
3 Barclays
4 Lloyds TSB
5 Jarvis
6 Johnson Service Group
7 Partygaming
8 Bradford & Bingley
9 British Airways
10 Petrel Resources

Top 10 Sells
1 Northern Rock
2 Barclays
3 Royal Bank of Scotland
4 Bradford & Bingley
5 Partygaming
6 Alliance & Leicester
7 Lloyds TSB
8 BHP Billiton Plc
9 Xstrata
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.