Investors cautious on conflicting reports about deal to resolve Greek financial problemsLeading shares slipped back on a combination of concerns, from Greece to Ukraine to China.Among the fallers was Standard Chartered, down 24p to 915.4p in belated reaction to a hefty sell note from Deutsche Bank. Analyst Jason Napier said:Standard Chartered’s disappointing share performance in 2014 - down 33% in dollars - took consensus forward PE multiples to decade-lows and bank market cap to just $35bn....A tremendous shift in capital allocation is required to get the return on total equity back to 15%, a level below which we don’t believe the Standard Chartered business model is sustainable. We think a $5.25bn capital increase is needed to accelerate change, re-provision the loan book, and provide the raw material for faster balance sheet growth. We have cut earnings per share and dividend per share estimates and with 10% downside to our 860p target price reduce to sell from hold.Key upside risks are much stronger-than-forecast capital formation, a bid for Standard Chartered or significant improvement in emerging market growth and commodity price prospects.In our view, ITV has been mostly an earnings per share momentum stock for the past three years, performing strongly in 2012 and 2013 and performing more poorly in 2014. Consequently, we feel the stock needs decent earnings per share upgrades to outperform. With 2015 advertising starting better than expected and with media buyers now calling for ITV Family NAR to be up 5%-6% in 2015, we think that decent earnings upgrades are likely. We move advertising growth up to 5.0% versus company-compiled consensus at 2.7% and are 6% above Bloomberg consensus for 2015. This is the main reason behind our upgrade to overweight with an increased 250p target (higher forecasts, higher market multiples). The other reasons we overweight ITV are: reasonable valuation, balance sheet opportunity, our preference for cyclicals, optionality on M&A, and optionality on retransmission fees. Risks to our overweight are: (1) impact of UK election on sentiment and advertising in the second half of 2015, and (2) question marks on the free-to-air business model. Based on these two threats, we expect outperformance to be front-end loaded.[For Marks] we expect e-commerce trends to improve, we see potential for multi-year gross margin gains and as it remains the default play on an improving UK consumer, at an undemanding valuation.We also upgrade Next as although we remain concerned about the sustainability of its Directory margin, we expect online sales trends to remain robust driven by brand and range extensions, competitive pricing and further improvements to service options.The interim management statement reassures on many fronts but we downgrade 2016 earnings per share by 6% to accommodate recent foreign exchange movements and more conservative profit assumptions regarding [recent acquisition] Avincis’ Energy activities [given the weak oil price]. Debate over the latter will rage until the March investor day and perhaps beyond, but the other 95% of Babcock is performing well.The order book provides excellent visibility while the pipeline should drive strong organic growth over the medium term. In our opinion this is not reflected in the current valuation multiples. However, ongoing concerns over the potential impact from the fall in the oil price on Avincis’s Energy Support Services business and the political risk to Her Majesty’s Naval Base Clyde if the SNP forms part of a new UK government after the general election may constrain the shares in the short term. Continue reading...
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