Thomas Cook’s (LON:TCG) earnings could be dented by as much as 8% as a result of Greek uncertainties and last week’s terrorist attack at a Tunisian beach resort, says Credit Suisse.
Tour operators generally will be affected by these events for the remainder of the summer season, according to analyst Tim Ramskill.
Credit Suisse retains ‘outperform’ ratings for both Thomas Cook and TUI (LON:TUI) but, with share price volatility possible in the short term, Ramskill reduces his price targets to 165p (from 180p) and 1270p (from 1320p) respectively.
Ramskill, in a note, points out that bookings to Tunisia account for 3% of the sector’s annual passenger volumes while 10% of all holiday makers visit Greece.
He also highlights that around 75-80% of summer bookings have already been made, but they would now likely reduce and that will have an impact on margins.
“Forecast uncertainty is high and further detail will likely be provided at Q3 results in the next 4-6 weeks.”
Colt Group (LON:COLT) is no longer a ‘buy’ according to Citi, which has cut the telecoms and data centre company to ‘neutral’.
RBC Capital, meanwhile, suggests investors waiting on Stagecoach (LON:SGC) have missed the bus, as the Canadian investment bank has downgraded the stock to ‘sector perform’ from ‘outperform’.
Elsewhere, the spotlight was on oil stocks.
North Sea-focused Faroe Petroleum (LON:FPM) was upgraded to ‘buy’ from ‘hold’ by Cantor Fitzgerald, which also lifts its price target to 101p from 82p.
“Rather than investing heavily in expensive and protracted developments, Faroe will look to monetise recent discoveries and is hoping 2015 will be another year of exploration success,” analyst Emily Ashford said in a note.
Ashford’s colleague at Cantor Sam Wahab, meanwhile, repeated a ‘sell’ recommendation for Tullow Oil (LON:TLW) due to concerns about the company’s over-reliance on debt financing to fund growth.
At the same time VSA Capital analyst Marc Anis-Hanna is expecting Tullow will start to see an improvement in the stock market.
“Although TLW is still below its 2014 average production, we think that operational progress mainly made in West and East Africa, as well as better costs management including less exploration expenditures should support investor sentiment,” he said.
In small caps, bonanza grades found at Sunrise Resources' (LON:SRES) Bay State project in Nevada, USA mean the project has become high priority for the explorer , says house broker Northland, which has started covering the shares with a "speculative buy".
It is an attractive target for further work and a fully funded follow up drill programme is planned for the second half of 2015, reckons analyst Ryan Long.
Elsewhere, the unique functionality of big data Cloud technology firm Rosslyn Data Technologies’ (LON:RDT) platform is a strong selling point, broker Cenkos believes.
In the increasingly crowded Cloud, Rosslyn’s RAPid processing engine allows non-techies to create their own business rules when extracting and analysing wodges of data, which reduces the burden on information technology professionals and puts the power in the hands of users who understand the data.
Based on its estimates for 2015, the company’s enterprise value divided by projected sales (EV/sales) is just 1.5, a multiple that is a 60% discount to the UK software sector; in Cenkos’s view, the discount is unjustified given the firm’s growth potential, and the broker rates the shares a 'buy'.