Top Ten Retail Investor Buys & Sells for week ending 2 January 2008

Angus Rigby, Chief Executive Officer, TD Waterhouse, commented: While the nation recovered from New Year's celebrations, the credit-crunch hangover from 2007 lingered on for UK investors, whose interest remained strong in financial and retail equities this week, as they contemplated the outlook for 2008. UK bank Barclays was this week's top ten buy for TD Waterhouse customers, despite its share value slipping by one per cent this week.

Meanwhile, mortgage banks Bradford & Bingley and Alliance & Leicester topped our retail investor stock sells. Alliance & Leicester has been a short-sell favourite for UK investors of late, but this week its share value jumped by 18 per cent on reports that it held takeover talks with Spanish bank Santander last month. Rival Bradford & Bingley also lifted three per cent this week, boosted by Alliance's auction speculation, but still remain down by over 40 per cent for the financial year.

The oil sector also experienced heavy trading on the first week back on the markets, as crude oil prices soared and fears over the weakening dollar coupled with heightened geopolitical tensions weighed on the market. Encore Oil was singled out by our customers this week, with optimism over chief executive Alan Booth's plans for oil exploration, both in the UK and further afield. Encouraged by his plans for a North Sea gas storage business, share price in the AIM-listed gas storage specialist was up by over 90 per cent, hitting annual highs of 51.50p this week.

Max Petroleum was also popular amongst TD Waterhouse customers this week with production resuming at the Zhana Makat field in Kazakhstan, after the Company gained approval of its gas utilisation plan by the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources. Share price lifted by 2.66 per cent this week and sits narrowly above its 52-week low of 61p per share.

TD Waterhouse Top Ten Retail Investor Buys & Sells for week ending 2 January 2008

Top 10 Buys
1 Barclays
2 Royal Bank of Scotland Group
3 Meldex International
4 BT Group
5 Max Petroleum
6 Partygaming
7 Northern Rock
8 Encore Oil
9 Woolworths Group
10 British Airways

Top 10 Sells
1 Bradford & Bingley
2 Alliance & Leicester
3 Barclays
4 Royal Bank of Scotland Group
5 British Airways
6 Meldex International
7 Vodafone Group
8 Lloyds TSB Group
9 Victoria Oil & Gas
10 Partygaming

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