The Christmas trading updates from the retailers have started coming in and many seem more appropriate for Halloween than the season of goodwill.
Supermarket chain Sainsbury’s (LON:SBRY) gets off relatively lightly, with shares shedding a smidgen after the company reported a fall of 1.7% in like-for-like (LFL) sales (excluding fuel) in the 14 weeks to 3 January.
At least Christmas was a success, with the company boasting of a record 29.5mln customer transactions.
Shareholders in Majestic Wine (LON:MJW) might be hitting the bottle after the wine seller’s trading statement … unfortunately, the retailer’s customers were not – at least, not in sufficient quantities to please the market.
LFL sales in the 10 weeks to 5 January were up 1.1%, which represents a slow-down in growth. The slow-down reduced the growth rate for LFL sales in the first 40 weeks of the company’s financial year to 2.0%, and the company admitted it had to sacrifice margins to generate sales.
Gross margin was off by half a percentage point, and chief executive Steve Lewis said the company expects the competitive pricing environment will continue throughout much of 2015.
If holders of Majestic Wine shares were hitting the bottle, investors in boohoo.com (LON:BOO) were shedding tears after the online fashion firm saw more than one-third of its market value lopped off after a profit warning.
The self-proclaimed "global fashion leader for a social generation" bumped up marketing spend to stimulate sales at the end of year but did not get the level of success it anticipated, thanks to those old-school rotters on the UK High Street discounting heavily.
Full-year results are now expected to be below market expectations. Boohoo, indeed…
2014 was a year to forget for Quindell (LON:QPP) but with the shares up almost 50% so far this year, 2015 is looking a lot brighter for the embattled insurance claims processing specialist.
Hedge fund Toscafund certainly seems to think so, as it has lifted its stake in Quindell above 5%.
Toscafund has a history of buying into beleaguered companies and helping putting them on their feet; sometimes with the blessing of the existing management, and sometimes not.
Finally, the season of the end-of-year quiz has now passed, but the Bank of England has made a late entry to the field with the release of previously withheld documents that detail the central bank’s response to the credit crunch in the latter half of the previous decade.
In order to minimise the chances of alarming information getting out about the parlous state of individual banks, the Bank of England adopted code names for those lenders deemed most at risk, namely Alliance & Leicester, Bradford & Bingley, HBOS, Lloyds TSB (LON:LLOY) and Royal Bank of Scotland (LON:RBS).
The code names were: badger, fox, lark, phoenix and tiger.
Northern Rock was presumably “lame duck”, or possibly "dodo".
Have a go at matching up the code words to the banks. The answers are given below.
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Alliance & Leicester - tiger
Bradford & Bingley - badger
HBOS - fox
Lloyds TSB - lark
Royal Bank of Scotland - phoenix