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Barclays 186p Questor says AVOID INVESTORS in Barclays [LON:BARC] should be careful what they wish for. Former chief executive Antony Jenkins was sacked last July for too much dithering over changes its new chairman thought should have been made. New chief executive Jess Staley was cast as a man of action when he joined in December, but he’s not the only one on the move, the shares are down 20pc in the past month. Action men The impetus for change was started by John McFarlane, who was brought in as chairman in April last year. His reputation as a no nonsense City operator is well deserved, as Mr Jenkins was shown the door barely three months later. Mr Staley intends to accelerate the turnaround at Barclays. The plan is fairly straightforward, shut down a lot of overseas offices and instead serve these clients from fewer hubs in London, New York and Singapore. The aim is to exit the loss-making parts of the bank, reduce staff by 1,200 and increase the return on capital for the group as a whole. Its investment bank operations in Thailand, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea and Australia are all being shut down. The Russian and Brazilian offices will shut and operations will be transferred to London and New York respectively. Streamlining for the future The hope is that by streamlining the operations and slashing away at the balance sheet the bank can become smaller but more profitable. The assets on the balance sheet are expected to fall from £1.36 trillion at the end of December 2014, to about £1 trillion by the end of 2018. In a rising interest rate environment, the net interest margin should rise and increase the main source of income. Fewer staff means lower costs as well. The pre-tax profits are expected to rise to £4.4bn for the end of 2015, from £2.3bn a year earlier. The hope among analysts is for pre-tax profits to steadily rise to £10bn by the end of 2018. That is an incredibly tempting prospect for investors with the shares trading at 178p at the end of last week, a 35pc discount to the estimated 284p net asset value per share. Dividend bonanza There is also the added bonus that dividends are expected to rise sharply as profits recover. Analysts expect the annual dividend to be held at 6.5p for 2015, offering a 3.7pc prospective dividend on the shares, before more than doubling to 15p three years later. It is an intoxicating offer in a world of almost zero returns on cash. Value trap The biggest issue for investors in bank shares is the risk to the equity of any movement in the asset base. The shareholders’ equity in Barclays is £56bn, sitting on top of £1.3 trillion of assets. Putting that into perspective, the equity is 4.3pc of the total assets. It doesn’t take much of a movement in the value of those mortgages and loans written all over the world to cause serious headaches for those holding the shares. Across the wo

While Barclays (LSE: BARC) may yield only 1.6% at the present time, over the coming years it is set to deliver rapid dividend growth. This could have the effect of increasing demand for the company's shares, which may lead to a higher stock price. And with inflation continuing to move higher, now could be the perfect time to buy a slice of the bank for the long term. A changing outlook Under its present management team, Barclays has not yet delivered for income investors. It has cut dividends, rather than raising them, and has instead focused on improving the quality of the business. This has involved investment as well as some restructuring. However, that phase of the bank's plan is now complete, which leaves it with the opportunity to generate higher profitability over the long run. Next year, dividends at the bank are expected to double. This means in 2018 it could be yielding as much as 3.3%. While still behind the FTSE 100's yield of 3.8%, this would return the stock to its previous status as a realistic income play. Looking beyond next year, more dividend growth seems very likely. As mentioned, it has now completed its restructuring and will be better-placed to pay out a higher proportion of profit as a dividend. This means that next year's forecast payout ratio of 29% could easily double to put the bank on a forward yield of as much as 6.7% over the next few years. Favourable outlook While political risk in the US and Europe remains heightened, Barclays looks set to benefit from a generally favourable market outlook. Monetary policy makers are set to continue to adopt a dovish stance across the developed world, while fiscal policy may become increasingly expansionary as governments seek to move on from the age of austerity. Since the bank operates in a range of markets and has a diverse set of operations, it also offers less risk than many of its sector peers. Should Brexit create greater uncertainty, for example, this may allow it to perform better than many of its industry rivals. As such, its risk/reward ratio appears to be highly favourable.

Share Activity Lifted for Barclays PLC (JO) in Session AUG 23, 2017 Financial News Staff Needle moving action has been spotted in Barclays PLC (JO) as shares are moving today on volatility -0.93% or -0.156 from the open. The NYSE listed company saw a recent bid of 16.654 and 173500 shares have traded hands in the session. Investors might be searching far and wide for the next set of winning stocks to add to the portfolio. Many value investors may be on the lookout for stocks that are underpriced at current levels. Some investors may be looking for names that have the potential to see major growth in the next few years. Picking growth companies can be a bit riskier, but they may have much bigger potential for substantial returns. Other investors may be interested in finding companies that provide stable returns and pay out a solid dividend. Investors may even choose to piece together the portfolio with stocks from different categories. Having a diverse selection of stocks is typically recommended for longer-term portfolio health. Digging deeping into the Barclays PLC (JO) ‘s technical indicators, we note that the Williams Percent Range or 14 day Williams %R currently sits at -99.64. The Williams %R oscillates in a range from 0 to -100. A reading between 0 and -20 would point to an overbought situation. A reading from -80 to -100 would signal an oversold situation. The Williams %R was developed by Larry Williams. This is a momentum indicator that is the inverse of the Fast Stochastic Oscillator. Barclays PLC (JO) currently has a 14-day Commodity Channel Index (CCI) of -96.84. Active investors may choose to use this technical indicator as a stock evaluation tool. Used as a coincident indicator, the CCI reading above +100 would reflect strong price action which may signal an uptrend. On the flip side, a reading below -100 may signal a downtrend reflecting weak price action. Using the CCI as a leading indicator, technical analysts may use a +100 reading as an overbought signal and a -100 reading as an oversold indicator, suggesting a trend reversal. Currently, the 14-day ADX for Barclays PLC (JO) is sitting at 24.68. Generally speaking, an ADX value from 0-25 would indicate an absent or weak trend. A value of 25-50 would support a strong trend. A value of 50-75 would identify a very strong trend, and a value of 75-100 would lead to an extremely strong trend. ADX is used to gauge trend strength but not trend direction. Traders often add the Plus Directional Indicator (+DI) and Minus Directional Indicator (-DI) to identify the direction of a trend. The RSI, or Relative Strength Index, is a widely used technical momentum indicator that compares price movement over time. The RSI was created by J. Welles Wilder who was striving to measure whether or not a stock was overbought or oversold. The RSI may be useful for spotting abnormal price activity and volatility. The RSI oscillates on a scale from 0 to 100. The normal readin

Barclays Plc (BARC) Barclays has been a source of frustration for shareholders for many years. Yet it has all the makings of a successful bank. It just has to get its act together. Identity crisis There’s no doubting that Barclays has some great businesses when you scratch the surface. It is of course one of the UK’s big four banks with 22 million retail customers and 1 million business customers. It also has Barclaycard; the UK’s leading issuer of credit cards, Barclays Stockbrokers; the leading stockbroker, Barclays Wealth; a leading wealth manager...and that’s just in the UK. Barclays also has operations in over 40 countries, the highlights of which are its global investment bank and its African operations. In fact, its international businesses deliver over half of its total pro ts. Investment banking is seen as the riskier but more lucrative cousin of retail banking. Instead of mortgages and current accounts, it involves things like advice on takeovers, raising debt and equity for large corporations and trading of bonds and shares. BarCap is the only British bank to make serious headway in investment banking, boosted by its opportunistic buy of Lehman Brothers core business during the nancial crisis. This gave Barclays a leg up to compete with Wall Street’s titans such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Today, BarCap is ranked 6th among the global investment banks and is the largest non- American investment bank in the world. Building that scale has not come easy or cheap and it’s understandable why Barclays is reluctant to part with one of its best assets, even if it is unfashionable. The problem for Barclays has not been a lack of good assets. It’s got plenty of those. The problem has been bringing them all together in a way that makes sense. And that’s the job of leadership. The revolving door Shareholders like stable leadership and a clear strategy, which is fair enough. But lately, Barclays has provided neither. The principal reason for the high turnover of CEOs has been a continuous series of scandals. As we know, whenever there is a big scandal, the media and politicians call for someone’s head, and in Barclay’s case, that’s been the CEO. Even the current CEO, Jes Staley, has been lucky to survive the recent ‘whistleblowing scandal’. As you’d expect, every CEO has had his own vision for Barclays and has set about making it happen, only to be replaced before he gets the job done. The new guy has then come in and taken the bank in a di erent direction. BarCap, in particular, has su ered. It was Bob Diamond’s baby, he loved it, nurtured it and was never going to scale it back. But his successor (I use the term loosely), Antony Jenkins, was a retail guy and was never a fan, so began to dismantle it, only for investment banker Jes Staley to take over and say steady on, this thing kicks o a lot of our pro t, let’s build it b

Secret weapon These days the Chairman of most FTSE 100 companies is a City grandee who sits quietly in the background and lets the CEO run the business. However, Barclays Chairman, John McFarlane is no wall ower. He sacked Antony Jenkins three months into the job. It wasn’t the rst time he ousted a CEO either, having done so as Aviva’s Chairman in 2012. McFarlane has built a reputation for accelerating turnarounds. When he joined Aviva it was in terrible shape. He sold o underperforming assets, cut layers of management and signi cantly improved its capital ratio. When he joined ANZ in 1997, it was losing money in Asia and had the highest costs of any local bank. Within four years, it had the lowest cost-to-income ratio of the major Australian banks. This is a man that gets things done. At Barclays, McFarlane’s made it clear that the investment bank is a prized asset, but that Barclays must focus on what it does best. The new strategy for Barclays is a lot clearer. Shut down a bunch of overseas o ces and serve clients from three main hubs – London, New York and Singapore. Exit the loss-making parts of the bank, reduce its stake in Barclays Africa and cut more branches and jobs. Barclays is bloated and McFarlane knows it, pointing out that it has 375 management committees. Its cost to income ratio of 62% is appalling compared to Lloyds at 47%. Under the new structure, the bank is split into two core divisions; Barclays UK houses the UK o ering (and will be ring fenced by 2019) and everything else is lumped into Barclays International. We’ve noted that Barclays is now taking a leaf out of Lloyd’s book and continuously using the words simple and straightforward. I don’t think Barclays will ever be a simple as Lloyds, but nor should it try to be. It’s got a better spread of assets and products. You can’t be simple and diversi ed at the same time. Turnaround time Barclays have stated their restructuring is just about complete. Now it’s a case of delivering the numbers. Its investment bank has been underperforming peers, which needs to be addressed. Income fell 4% in the rst quarter compared to an average of 15% growth at the big ve US banks. I’m sure it hasn’t been easy to retain ‘talent’ when your strategy is changing every other day. A period of stability would greatly bene t Barclays. Barclays would also bene t from simply staying out of trouble. More than any other UK bank, it’s had one scandal after the next, which has been both costly and distracting. There are still a few bubbling away, but provisions appear to have already been made for these. For investors, it’s disappointing that the dividend has been cut for the next two years to conserve capital, but at least its capital position is getting increasingly stronger. Overall, Barclays looks under-owned and under- valued. However, Barclays has a wonderful mix of assets and is ripe

Deutsche Bank remains bullish on Barclays (LON:BARC), believing the lender has secured its capital position. The comments come after the FTSE 100 lender updated investors on its interim performance last week, posting a half-year loss, but noting that the restructuring of the group’s business to focus on operations in the UK and the US was now complete. Barclays’ share price lost ground in the previous session, shedding 1.02 percent to close at 203.00p. The stock underperformed the broader UK market, with the benchmark FTSE 100 index adding 3.63 points to end the session 0.05 percent higher at 7,372.00. The group’s shares have added just under 10 percent to their value over the past year, and are up by some three percent in the year-to-date. Deutsche Bank reiterated its ‘buy’ rating on Barclays yesterday, with a price target of 229p on the shares. The results come after the lender posted an attributable loss of £1.2 billion for the half-year ended June 30. The company’s profit before tax, however, increased 13 percent to £2.34 billion, reflecting lower losses in its non-core operations. “Barclays is targeting more than 10 percent return on tangible equity in a ‘reasonable timeframe’ along with a less than 60 cost/income ratio,” the broker’s analyst David Lock pointed out, as quoted by Citywire. “Now that Barclays’ capital position is secure, we think a key part of this group strategy will involve reallocation of capital towards higher returning businesses in the international business –and we expect greater detail from management in coming quarters.” The 21 analysts offering 12-month price targets for Barclays for the Financial Times have a median target of 230.00p, with a high estimate of 265.00p and a low estimate of 160.00p. As of July 28, the consensus forecast amongst 25 polled investment analysts covering the blue-chip group advises investors to hold their position in the company. As of 08:10 BST, Tuesday, 01 August, Barclays share price is 204.10p.

On the face of it, Barclays' first-half results beat City consensus forecasts but analysts had mixed feelings after digging deeper into the numbers. Barclays reported a £1.2bn loss or the first half of 2017, thanks to a £1.4bn writedown from its sale of a 34% stake in Barclays Africa, a £1.1bn impairment of its remaining holding in the African business and a £700m provision against PPI mis-selling. However, RBC Capital Markets said the second quarter results were a 6% miss versus consensus due to the non-core bank which has been folded back into the main bank. The core bank was in line with expectations, RBC said, with the miss driven by greater non-core losses from a faster run-down of risk-weighted assets to £23bn compared to £25bn guidance. Analyst Laith Khalaf at Hargreaves Lansdown said it was a "perplexing" set of results as "the bad bank is getting better, but the good bank is getting worse". The core business saw a 25% fall in PBT to £2.99bn, with Barclays UK responsible for most of the fall as profit fell 41% from to £634m thanks to PPI charges and the prior year’s Visa boost. But he said the completion of the bank's restructuring is a "significant milestone", but now Barclays is in the shape envisaged by management, "the pressure is on to perform". "To that end its figures for 2017 are far from convincing, with the core bank floundering, and progress actually coming from the non-core. The market will be hoping for a bit more positive news in the remainder of the year, though conduct issues may well overshadow the bank’s performance.," he said. Investec's Ian Gordon called the numbers "messy" and said it was "hard to take too many incremental positives" beyond regulatory capital being better than expected, with the "theoretical" underlying profit only beating consensus due to a £109m Vocalink gain, with fixed income, currencies and commodities performance again "poor". Disappointment in underlying revenues, which are a 3% miss on consensus forecasts, was primarily reflecting further weakness within investment banking, driven again by macro where revenues fell 7% on the prior quarter and 25% on the year, which is "particularly poor" in the context of specific underperformance in the first quarter 2017 and continued FX support for the year on year comparatives, notwithstanding weakness already seen from most US peers. He said the 3p “token” dividend in 2017 was unsurprising given prior guidance, but looking ahead he is optimistic as 2017 "should be the peak year for both non-core losses and restructuring charges", so if regulatory/conduct is not too bad, he expects reported earnings and dividends to "meaningfully recover in 2018 and beyond". However, Gordon felt the shares are "too cheap" at 0.7 times current tangible net asset value

Barclays PLC Barclays PLC The Barclays PLC (LON:BARC) (BARC.L) share price may experience some volatility today in my view, after it released H1 results which show an attributable loss of just over £1.2 billion. This was due to an impairment of the bank’s holding in Barclays Africa Limited (BAGL) of £1.1 billion and a loss on the sale of 33.7% of BAGL’s issued share capital of just over £1.4 billion. This was primarily due to the recycling of currency translation reserve losses to the income statement. However, excluding the above items means Barclays recorded a £1.6 billion profit after tax in respect of continuing operations. Further, the sale of its majority shareholding in BAGL will allow Barclays to apply for regulatory deconsolidation, which it expects to achieve in 2018. Since it has permission to apply proportional consolidation to its reduced shareholding, it means the company has a CET1 ratio of 13.1%. It expects to realise a further 26bps upflift resulting from the sale. In addition to the sale of its majority shareholding in BAGL, there was also completion of the rundown of the Non-Core unit to below the target of £25 billion in Risk Weighted Assets. This has allowed Barclays to close it 6 months early and incorporate the residual assets back into its Core division. This means the restructuring of the bank is now complete, with its capital ratio within the end-state target range. Excluding the negative impact of the BAGL sale, Barclays recorded a rise in profit before tax of 13% to £2.3 billion, with Barclays UK and Barclays International business divisions posting returns on tangible equity of 20.4% and 12.4% respectively (excluding the provision for PPI). With the company now seeking a return on tangible equity of over 10% in the long run for the entire group, I’m feeling upbeat about its prospects. Sure, today’s headline figures are relatively disappointing. But on an underlying basis I believe the company could have investment appeal for the long run. With its restructuring now complete, I’m feeling more upbeat about the long term outlook for the Barclays share price.

Barclays PLC (SGG) shares are moving today on volatility -0.88% or $-0.25 from the open. The NYSE listed company saw a recent bid of $28.23 and 98608 shares have traded hands in the session. It is no secret that most investors have the best of intentions when diving into the equity markets. Making sound, informed decisions can help the investor make the most progress when dealing with the markets. Often times, investors may think they have everything in order, but they still come out on the losing end. Investors may need to figure out ways to keep emotion out of stock picking. Sometimes trading on emotions can lead to poor results. Making hasty decisions and not paying attention to the correct data can lead to poor performing portfolios in the long-term. Taking a deeper look into the technical levels of Barclays PLC (SGG), we can see that the Williams Percent Range or 14 day Williams %R currently sits at -53.12. The Williams %R oscillates in a range from 0 to -100. A reading between 0 and -20 would point to an overbought situation. A reading from -80 to -100 would signal an oversold situation. The Williams %R was developed by Larry Williams. This is a momentum indicator that is the inverse of the Fast Stochastic Oscillator. Barclays PLC (SGG) currently has a 14-day Commodity Channel Index (CCI) of -3.43. Active investors may choose to use this technical indicator as a stock evaluation tool. Used as a coincident indicator, the CCI reading above +100 would reflect strong price action which may signal an uptrend. On the flip side, a reading below -100 may signal a downtrend reflecting weak price action. Using the CCI as a leading indicator, technical analysts may use a +100 reading as an overbought signal and a -100 reading as an oversold indicator, suggesting a trend reversal. The RSI, or Relative Strength Index, is a widely used technical momentum indicator that compares price movement over time. The RSI was created by J. Welles Wilder who was striving to measure whether or not a stock was overbought or oversold. The RSI may be useful for spotting abnormal price activity and volatility. The RSI oscillates on a scale from 0 to 100. The normal reading of a stock will fall in the range of 30 to 70. A reading over 70 would indicate that the stock is overbought, and possibly overvalued. A reading under 30 may indicate that the stock is oversold, and possibly undervalued. After a recent check, Barclays PLC’s 14-day RSI is currently at 42.94, the 7-day stands at 44.48, and the 3-day is sitting at 32.95. Currently, the 14-day ADX for Barclays PLC (SGG) is sitting at 31.00. Generally speaking, an ADX value from 0-25 would indicate an absent or weak trend. A value of 25-50 would support a strong trend. A value of 50-75 would identify a very strong trend, and a value of 75-100 would lead to an extremely strong trend. ADX is used to gauge trend strength but not trend direction. Traders often add the Plus Directional Indicator (+DI) and M

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