That Was The Week That Was - w/e 2-Aug-2019

This is the third of a series of weekly data delves in to what the market has taken as being the most significant RNS announcements of the week. The previous view can be found here and this in turn links to the first review.

Pre-amble

I have been putting some effort into improving the automation of compiling this data with the aim of simplifying production and enabling some ‘value-add’ on some associated projects.

As you may know, new software deployments can cause some short term pain before the benefits become apparent, this is no exception, so this has been hard work this week!

I cover off below where the changes are taking me. This might be a bit heavy going for some, so if you are not interested in this element, please skip forward to My remaining “universe” of stocks. (After the horizontal bar)

 

In particular I have been  filtering out the chaff. With this in mind I thought it worth clarifying what is the market universe for this exercise.

When I first thought of the initial idea behind this view I initially glibly expected to cover the entire universe of UK listed stocks. This is actually not such a simple concept to clarify;  the LSE presents a list of all traded companies updated monthly here at the time of writing this comprises 2,106 companies.

Unfortunately this list does not contain ‘tickers’ and whilst 90%+ are easy to match-up, there is a tail of stocks for which I need to do the heavy lifting of manual look ups. (Unless anyone has a fully comprehensive mapping?)

The other issue is that the official list includes ‘stocks’ which as I will explain, actually fall outside of my criteria.

“Funds”

I use this term quite loosely and refer to Investment Trusts, VCTs, REITs etc. There are two reasons for me to exclude them one practical  and one philosophical.

The practical reason is that for these entities my sources of stock price data do not always ‘print’ a price every day and seem to fluctuate from time to time between quoting the price in Pounds or Pence. Neither of those is insurmountable, but it is an irritant I do not need at this stage given my philosophical  reason.

These investments are not currently of interest to me and particularly not in the case of this exercise.

I am eliminating them from my reference data as and when they arise as I have not found a fully comprehensive way of finding them. The appear across a range of “Industry Groups” and whilst I am pretty sure I will end up eliminating all “Collective Investments” , some of the other entries are not consistent with the broader industry descriptions.

“Secondary Listings”

That is to say stocks that have a primary listing in a non-UK market. Again there are practical and philosophical reasons for excluding these.

From a practical point of view, my share price data providers appear to have ceased to reliably report daily prices (so I would probably have to find the price on their primary listing).

And philosophically again I am not interested in this group currently. Regulatory requirements and governance may differ and in particular I am not clear what obligations they have in reporting “news” via RNS (from a quick scan there appears to be some variability).

There may be a middle ground here where I can include some of these stocks, but for the time being I will focus on a stable data set.

---

My remaining “universe” of stocks.

 

So I am focussing on all stocks excluding  “funds “ and those where the UK is a secondary listing.

As things stand, the pool of stocks against which I am running this exercise stands at just below 1,800 UK stocks. I expect this number to fall as and when I make additional exclusions as they crop up (or I find a systematic way to complete the exclusions.)

This week’s findings

  There was a higher number of RNSes in total this week at over 4,000. I believe this is due in part to a slew of end of month announcements – many of these fall outside the remit of the study but never the less there was a higher than usual number of potentially interesting announcements, averaging over 180 per day (although I did not make any refinements this week towards eliminating those announcements that are purely “admin”.)

The number of announcements associated with a large movement in price (>+/- 5%) was also up at 136 in total. (please note that in some cases there are multiple announcements for one stock, but there were still 117 individual stocks featuring).

Here is the quick summary by market cap size (<£30m = “Micro”) and scale of share price change

Once again, even if one ignores the micro-caps there is plenty of potential interest. I have little time now to provide any real insight, but as before here for potential further reading are all of those announcements associated with share price movements above +/- 10% (57 in total – happy reading!)

As ever, all comments gratefully received and hopefully if I can complete the automation advances over the coming weeks, there may be more scope for tweaks and improvements.

---

The Detail

NB It is worth noting that the first two entries in the table (and potentially others) were made during market hours which explains the lack of movement at the open, compared with the overall change on the day.

The last entry on the other hand was made at 7am, so evidently the market (or the market makers) took a little time to make their minds up.