Thursday newspaper share tips: Steer clear of banking sector

The Telegraph’s Questor wasn’t so hot on the UK banking sector as it published an in-depth look into it on Thursday

The column noted that shares in the sector have fallen over 20% so far this year, due to fears about how it would cope in another downturn.

It said there is an element of nervousness when it comes to how bank share prices react.

“Shares in Deutsche Bank, one of Europe’s biggest lenders, are behaving like a penny share, dropping 14pc in two days after fears were raised over the lender’s capital reserves,” Questor said.

“The stock then erased those losses after chief executive John Cryan claimed the business was “rock solid” and would consider buying back some of its bonds.”

Questor said that London banks haven’t escaped the sell-off, with problems in their European peers sparking concerns about another crisis in the sector.

It also said that UK banks haven’t completely repaired their balance sheets over the last six years.

For that reason, Questor said that equity investors needed to think twice about whether to buy into a sector that was “still paying for its past sins”, and advised traders to avoid it.

Over in The Times, Tempus had a look through ARM Holdings’ latest full-year results which caused the shares to tumble on Wednesday.

The FTSE 100 company posted a strong set of full-year results and said it was confident of meeting forecasts for 2016 as demand for its microchip technology continued to grow.

Despite the profit warning from smaller rival Imagination Technologies earlier in that same week, ARM's fourth quarter saw a 19% increase in revenue to £269.1m, ahead of consensus forecasts, helping to lift profits 17% to £138.7m.

For the full-year, this meant revenue rose 22% to £968.3m, beating consensus forecasts of £962m, with profit before tax up 24% to £511m and earnings per share up 25% to 30.2p.

A 25% increase in the final dividend to 5.63p per share meant the total payment was also up 25% to 8.78p, while management also planned to continue its small share buyback programme.

Tempus said the results showed that Imagination Technologies’s weakness was isolated to that particular company and was not linked to the wider semi-conductor market nor with supplying Apple.

It believed that ARM had diversified from the core mobile devices market more successfully compared to its competitor, with 55% of revenues coming from elsewhere.

“Of that other 45 per cent, a proportion does go to Apple, but this is less than 10 per cent of the total across the group and you would have to take a pretty gloomy view of prospects for the world’s most profitable company to see this as too much of a negative.”

Tempus said it would back ARM Holdings as it believed the company would stay ahead of the semi-conductor market, justifying the high price, and rated it at ‘buy long term’.