Wednesday newspaper share tips: GKN, St.James´s Place

GKN continued to outperform its markets over the latest nine-month period and its acquisition of Fokker looks to have been another clever deal, like the purchase of Volvo Aero in 2012, but it´s time to take profits, The Times´s Tempus said.

There are also the fruits of its cost-reduction programme to look forward to.

Meanwhile, its driveline unit continues to produce bumper profits, with organic sales having jumped 6%, far in excess of forecasts.

However, its commercial aeropsace programme has run into well-publicised delivery problems for the Airbus A320neo´s engines. Sales of military aircraft were also down again, although that was not unexpected as the F-18 attack craft and Black Hawk helicopter programmes wind up, the tipster said.

Furthermore, growth in the global automotove market is set to slow from 2% in 2016 to 1% in 2017 while Land Systems is still in a rut, trying to sell into weak US agricultural machinery markets.

Trading on 11 times´ earnings the shares are not particularly expensive, Tempus said, yet given their strong run since the summer and market negativity, "some might consider taking profits".

Buy shares in St.James´s Place, Tempus added.

The wealth manager has come through the Brexit storm well. Indeed, over the three months to September net inflows were a little ahead of last year´s mark, at £1.66bn.

In its favour as well, only a quarter of its assets under management are in the UK.

Now that the uncertainty over the sector is lifting the stock looks set to back on the buy list.