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…
