Monday 27 April
-Nationwide UK house price index
Tuesday 28 April
-HSBC Q1 results
HSBC kicks off a week of quarterly reports from Britain’s biggest banks. AJ Bell investment director Russ Mould said the FTSE 100 bank’s loan and impairment charge, which came out $585m a year ago, will provide clues on how economies in Asia, the US and UK, where its operations are based, are holding up amid the Covid-19 crisis.
“In the Q1 reporting season in the USA, the Big Four Main Street banks – Bank of America, Citigroup, JP Morgan and Wells Fargo – took $24 billion of such provisions between them in Q1 2020, the highest quarterly total since Q1 2010, when they were still staggering out of the credit crisis,” he noted.
Analysts will also be watching for growth in loans and deposits to see if HSBC’s clients made “a dash for cash” like the American banks’ customers, Mould added.
-European banks Banco Santander and UBS release quarterly results
-BP Q1 results
So far oil giants like BP have refrained from slashing their dividends but with oil prices still at depressed levels after turning negative for the first time ever last week, there are questions over whether they can hold out, the Share Centre said.
-Bank of Japan interest rate decision
– S&P/Case-Shiller US house price index
-US consumer confidence update
“This should be fascinating as the reading has largely moved in lockstep with the S&P 500 index over the past decade or so,” said Mould.
“That in turn may help to explain why both President Trump and the US Federal Reserve both seem keen to give financial markets plenty of support, given that consumer spending generates about 70% of US GDP and the current crisis, lockdowns and huge jump in unemployment strike straight at Americans’ ability to spend.”
-Starbucks, 3M, Mondelez and Pfizer report
Wednesday 29 April
-US Federal Reserve meeting
This will be the Fed’s first scheduled meeting since January after making two surprise announcements in March in which it slashed rates from 0.75% to 0.25% and revived its QE programme, which now stands at $15bn a day, extending it to include junk bonds as well as government and investment grade bonds.
Mould points out the Fed’s balance sheet has soared by $2.2trn since the end of February, meaning it has provided nearly as much stimulus in six weeks as it did in the two years of QE1 and QE2 after the global financial crisis.
“That tidal wave of liquidity looks to be carrying US stocks higher,” said Mould, “but students of history will remember that the first round of quantitative easing that began in autumn 2008 had a similar initial effect, only for the S&P 500 to buckle in face of weak macroeconomic data and corporate earnings reports and only bottom five months later.”
– Barclays, AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline and Persimmon report
-Next trading update
-Last month the high street retailer said it was bracing for a potential loss of up to £1bn in sales following the closure of all its stores during the coronavirus lockdown and cancelled its final dividend.
However, the Share Centre noted its online business has been performing well, adding “it was good to hear recently that it has reopened partially“.
-Full year results from Whitbread
–Tech giants Microsoft and Facebook reveal quarterly earnings, alongside Elon Musk’s electric car company Tesla, GE and Spotify
-US oil inventory data
-US ADP payrolls data
-Deutsche Bank and Volkswagen report quarterly results
-Quarterly update from Samsung Electronics
Thursday 30 April
-Sainsbury full year results
-Royal Dutch Q1 results
Mould says extraordinary events in the oil market mean Shell’s Q1 profits will be even harder to predict, even though crude’s collapse into negative territory happened three weeks after the quarter’s end.
In Q4 19 Shell’s average price for selling oil was $56.60 a barrel, over double the price of Brent crude at the end of March ($22.74 p/b).
The consensus range for Shell’s underlying profit on current cost of supply for 2020 is “is understandably all over the place,” said Mould, with the average coming in at $9.4bn, the highest forecast at $18.4bn and the lowest pointing to a $5.7bn loss.
-St James’s Place reports Q1 sales
SJP’s latest update will reveal the full impact of Covid-19 on its flows and assets under management in the first quarter. Its full year figures in February showed a 13% drop in net inflows but AUM remained resilient, increasing 22% to £117bn.
The Share Centre said all eyes will be on SJP to see if it can maintain its dividend. “The consensus is for a slight drop, but the prospective yield remains a very nice 6.3%.”
-Trading statements from Lloyds, British American Tobacco, Glencore and Smurfit Kappa
-Apple, McDonalds, Conoco Philips, Kraft Heinz, Kellogg and Twitter unveil quarterly figures
-European Central Bank meeting
Canaccord Genuity Wealth Management investment manager Sam Buckingham noted last week the ECB relaxed its lending criteria to include junk bonds as collateral in a bid to halt rising Italian government bond yields, which have almost doubled this year.
“It’s worth noting that we will also receive Q1 GDP growth readings for the Eurozone on Thursday morning, prior to the central bank meeting,” he added.
-Chicago Fed purchasing managers’ index
Friday 1 May
-RBS Q1 results
-GfK UK consumer confidence reading
-UK PMI data
-US non-farm payrolls data
-Q1 results from oil majors ExxonMobil and Chevron, as well as consumer goods companies Colgate-Palmolive, Estee Lauder and Clorox
