I don’t care how fast the wind speed is – 94 mph by all accounts – it is still difficult to take seriously a storm called Doris.
Follow this important advice ! #StormDoris pic.twitter.com/vKbWasyXBa
— Jamie Tinsley (@jamietinsley156) February 23, 2017
About the only thing less threatening sounding is Storm Jeremy .. talking of which, the windy weather probably is not doing much for the prospects of a high turn-out in today’s Stoke & Copeland by-election. This may or may not be good news for Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, who - if he had a chairman and were the Labour Party a football club - would be getting the chairman's vote of confidence round about now.
Keeping in theme with today’s somewhat windy subject matter, US electrical appliances maker Whirlpool Corporation (NYSE:WHR) has some safety advice of owners of Indesit and Hotpoint tumble dryers.
Unplug them and get them checked out by an expert.
The advice came after a freedom of information request carried out by the Daily Mirror revealed there were 926 fires between 2011 and 2013 caused by tumble dryers, according to data supplied by fire brigades across the UK.
Whirlpool said of the 3.8 million possibly dodgy machines thought to be still in service, 1.5 million customers have registered for a repair. It said 1.3 million of these cases have been resolved.
In more conventional business news, customers are deserting British Gas in droves – a type of car popular in Romania in the sixties.
Centrica PLC (LON:CNA), which owns the British Gas brand (and the Scottish Gas brand, for that matter), saw customer numbers reduce by an astounding 409,000 during 2016, though it says it stemmed the rate of defections in the second half of the year.
Meanwhile, shares in banking titan Barclays PLC (LON:BARC) briefly hit a 52-week high this morning after announcing pre-tax profit of £3.2bn for 2016.
The numbers were short of market expectations, and a dividend cut did not help sentiment, and the share price fell back.
Meanwhile, over on Twitter it appears Barclays employees in Ghana do “dress down Friday” a bit differently.
Our colleagues showed their creative side with our cloth. Here's a look at some of the fashion during our 100years launch #Barclays@100 pic.twitter.com/ODtTAOGnoL
— Barclays Ghana (@BarclaysGhana) February 17, 2017
The share price of sector peer Lloyds Banking Group PLC (LON:LLOY) continues to head north after yesterday’s impressive results.
The government, meanwhile, seems happy to sell into strength, reducing its stake to less than 4%.
Sticking with FTSE 100 companies, could a name change be in the offing for British American Tobacco PLC (LON:BATS).
It seems to be focusing more on the vaping market, which is probably not a bad idea, given tobacco volumes were broadly flat.
There’s still plenty of money to be made in selling gaspers, though, and the company has lifted its full-year dividend by 10%.
Among the small caps, Oesophogeal Doppler monitoring specialist Deltex Medical Group plc (LON:DEMG) is racking up the clicks on that there internet, as investors check out its latest announcement about orders for its blood monitoring devices.
The medical device specialist's boss Ewan Philips told Proactive Investors it was particularly nice to see the orders coming in early in the new year having slipped from 2016, and would allow the firm to get on with driving the other more important revenue streams.
The company’s business model is akin to the razor blade model: it sells the monitors, and then racks up recurring revenue from selling probes to the monitor owners.