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Clearly it does not help that the US central bank seems wary about stimulating the flagging US economy with further monetary stimulus. But the chief reason to sell Ashtead's shares is because it's unlikely that their high-flying price can break away from United Rentals' for too long.

More worrying is that in July United's bosses said that revenue in the second half would miss Wall Street's targets, although they still expected to beat forecasts for cash profits. Street analysts felt they released these new numbers, which had not been provided in the second-quarter trading update, to calm the markets. They did anything but. From the May's high point, United's share price has slumped 31 per cent. Ashtead, in stark contrast, saw its share price jump another 10 per cent after it reported strong first-quarter trading, with revenue up 21 per cent and underlying pre-tax profit rising 38 per cent to £61m. Chief executive Geoff Drabble says he expects full-year results to beat expectations. Management also increased capital spending in the first quarter to £223m, compared with £156m a year earlier, with the aim of spending about £450m on new plant for the whole year. Yet first-quarter results were more muted. Underlying pre-tax profits rose strongly, from £34m to £61m, but the reported figure saw profits up from £33.1m to just £34.9m after taking a £26.5m one-off hit related to refinancing.

Shares in rental specialists United Rentals and Ashtead, who hire everything from saws to bulldozers, have been glued together for the past three years (see chart) - not surprising as both their fortunes are closely tied to the US economy. But since May something significant has happened - their share prices have parted company. Ashtead reported record trading in its first quarter to the end of July, while United Rentals announced that second-half revenues would miss market expectations. As a result, United's shares sunk while Ashtead's hit record highs. Yet the worry is that the softer outlook for the second half, which has already hit United, also spells trouble for Ashtead. So, after a record run, it's time to take profits and sell Ashtead. Even though their headquarters are 3,500 miles apart, United Rentals and Ashtead are sector peers because Ashtead's US arm, Sunbelt, generated 84 per cent, or £945m, of 2011-12 group revenue. More significantly, all of the group's £181m operating profits came from the US. The UK arm, A-Plant, generated revenues of £189m and operating profits of just £7m. So, when the share prices of these two all-but-identical companies started diverging, as they did recently, it's significant. Sure, some of United Rentals' investors are selling because a $2.53bn deal to buy rival RSC, which closed in April, included taking on a whopping $2.3bn in debt. And if over $200m in cost savings fail to materialise, profits may unravel, too. But that deal was announced in December so investors have had plenty of opportunity to get out. Besides, initially it prompted the share price to rise over 60 per cent to $44 by May.

Vitec's shares trade on 12 times forecast earnings, which looks undemanding compared with industrial stocks and broadcast-equipment companies generating similar gross margins. It now has a focused portfolio of businesses with strong brand names in exciting niche markets

Admittedly, defence work is lumpy and orders from the US Department of Justice - worth $7.6m (£4.8m) last year - were much lower. Yet sales of wireless products for US state police helicopters still grew, ensuring divisional profits jumped 40 per cent to £8.4m on sales up 12 per cent to £74m. And Vitec's share price will respond well to news of US government-funded contracts when they come. And imaging - Vitec's photographic unit - is exciting. Organic sales grew 4 per cent, despite the problems at staging, and profits rose 8 per cent to £10.4m. More professional photographers are buying its equipment and amateur snappers love the new premium, Manfrotto Powerbrand products, driving market share gains in the US and Europe. Hiring broadcast equipment for Olympics coverage also proved lucrative for the much smaller services division, which will ship kit to the US for November's presidential election. There's plenty to drive Vitec's share price. Broadcast and video markets are expected to grow 7 per cent a year, and both the photographic and military sectors by 5 per cent. True, Vitec's bosses did not upgrade their full-year profits guidance when reporting half-year figures, but there is potential for an earnings surprise, given £10m of Olympics money is still to come, the US election and the sale of the staging division.

Vitec has put sophisticated cameras in some odd places, most recently London's Olympic swimming pool and the Big Brother house. Now, its antennas and telemetric systems have reached Mars, but its bosses have their feet firmly on the ground. So, after a big strategic push and strong results, Vitec's shares look worth buying. That Vitec got to the red planet at all is down to Haigh-Farr, a US company it bought in December. Its kit, which is fitted to the parachute cone of the Mars entry vehicle, beamed data to the boffins at NASA. Haigh-Farr makes miniaturised transmitters for military drones and guided missiles, too, and is already generating profits for Vitec. It's a similar story at Camera Corps (CC), which cost just £8m in April and sits within Vitec's Videocom division, which makes a living from broadcasters and selling to the military, aerospace and government sectors. CC has already chipped in £1.4m of revenue and operating profit of £0.3m, and will do more in the second half after supplying small remotely operated high-definition cameras for the Olympics. These are smart acquisitions, but management, led by chief executive Stephen Bird, is not afraid to sell, either. Clear-Com, an underperforming wireless audio equipment business, went in 2010 and offloading the low-margin staging business last month looks sensible. That operation lost £0.5m in the first half of 2012 after sales slumped by a third and its disposal will cost Vitec over £2m. Its disposal will help return profit margins to pre-recession levels this year. Mr Bird thinks margins in the mid-teens are achievable. They leapt 1.6 percentage points in the first half of 2012 to 10.7 per cent, generating 21 per cent growth in underlying operating profit - 9 per cent excluding acquisitions - to £18.9m, from a modest increase in sales. Videocom did best. Of course, Haigh-Farr and CC helped, but there was strong demand among Asian broadcasters, especially for high-definition kit, LED lighting and robotic camera pedestals. Vitec is already working with Al-Jazeera as it refits studios in Qatar, and major projects elsewhere in the Middle East and South Korea are in the pipeline.

Charles Taylor is a complex business and management is only starting to realise the benefits of more cross selling and marketing initiatives, so there should be more to come. Likewise the share price - supported by a nice dividend yield - is starting to make progress, but should continue to rise as the recovery story gains credibility.......as always dyor gl all.......

The management services division typically runs insurance services for interest groups that club together. For example, its largest client is The Standard Club, owned by shipowners and formed to insure shipowners, operators and charterers for their liabilities to third parties arising from their operations. So Charles Taylor does the marketing, manages the underwriting and claims and provides regulatory, accounting and administration services. Several new members have been signed up this year, which helped to boost management services operating profits by 44 per cent to £2.6m in the first half. Insurance support services allows clients to select a specific service that they require, be it financial reporting, investment management or alternative risk services. This made a small loss last year, but broke even in the first half thanks to higher demand for outsourced back office insurance services from Lloyd's of London. Net debt rose slightly at the half year-end compared with the end of last year, but was down from a year ago by £4.4m at £34.2m. And last year's first-half net cash outflow of £500,000 has been turned into a £3.6m net inflow.

As Charles Taylor Consulting, the insurance services group had an image problem. So one of the first steps that new chief executive David Marock took was to drop the word 'Consulting' from the title. It may not seem much, but it makes a difference. As Mr Marock said soon after his appointment: "It's all about client relationships." The task remains for Charles Taylor to make its customers aware of the wide range of services on offer, and, after several years of decline, the signs are encouraging. Steps have also been taken to tidy up the group's products into more easily recognisable units, which now comprise management services, loss adjusting and insurance support. Management has also sown the seeds for future growth by introducing a range of new products and services plus extra financial discipline. On the adjusting side, for instance, the focus has been to drive down working capital requirements by improving the speed of invoicing work and collecting cash - cash collections in the first half were up 11 per cent at £30m. On adjusting, where the company works to reduce the size of insurance claims and earns a fee for its time, business has been tough mainly because there were fewer large and complex insurance claims to dispute in the London insurance market in the first half of 2012, especially in the energy sector. As a result, profits slipped from £3.8m to £2.7m. Taylor's run-off business, which manages insurance operations that no longer take new business, now comprises just a small part of the group and is barely profitable. That said, some cash was released from the integration of a closed life insurer, Alico, acquired last year and management hope to add more life operations, but will wind down the non-life side.

Bank of America's shares trade on just 0.6 times its reported tangible book value of $13.22 a share; shares in rival Wells Fargo, by contrast, trade at a multiple of about 1.3 times. Its shares are also merely rated in line with those of struggling UK lenders, such as RBS and Lloyds , yet Bank of America has minimal exposure to the eurozone. All of which points towards the shares looking cheap........but always do your own research......

Bank of America is also insulated from the eurozone. Its exposure to Greece, Italy, Ireland, Portugal and Spain stands at just $9.6bn; by contrast, Barclays, for example, has £72.4bn at risk in those five nations. The bank is also increasingly well capitalised. Its ratio of tier-one common capital (basically equity) to assets, weighted for risk, rose 11.2 per cent from 8.2 per cent a year earlier. That leaves it among the best capitalised in the US - Wells Fargo's ratio stands at 10.1 per cent while JPMorgan's is 10.3 per cent But building that capital cushion has meant weak payouts for shareholders. No share buybacks are planned and the dividend is nominal. Management's efforts to grow the payout ended in failure in 2011's second half after regulators at the Federal Reserve Bank blocked the move - they prefer banks to retain capital. That said, shares in US banks aren't known for their generous dividends; even the fattest yield in the banking sector, on JPMorgan's shares, is only about 3 per cent. There's also the problem of pressure from the institutions that bought mortgage-backed bonds issued by US banks - they reckon they were mis-sold them. It's a problem for most US banks and Bank of America saw its buyback claims rise by over $6bn in the second quarter to $22.7bn. However, management reckons that most new claims relate to bonds, where the underlying borrowers made at least two years of payments before defaulting, indicating that the bank may not be at fault. Besides, past settlements have typically been between 6¢ and12¢ in the dollar, suggesting a manageable overall exposure.

Go back to 2008's financial crisis and Bank of America, weakened by the acquisition of Merrill Lynch, looked troubled - by spring 2009, it had taken $45bn (£28bn) of US government support. But, unlike UK banks that needed bailout cash, Bank of America had recovered sufficiently by the end of 2009 to repay US taxpayers. And progress has continued since then, leaving the shares, which still trade well below reported net tangible assets, with plenty of recovery potential. First-half results for 2012 certainly contained evidence of recovery. Bank of America turned a hefty $10.1bn pre-tax loss in the previous first half into a $3.9bn pre-tax profit, helped by a big improvement in credit quality. Provisions for credit losses fell 41 per cent year on year to $4.19bn and non-performing loans as a proportion of all loans fell to 2.87 per cent from 3.22 per cent a year earlier. Further progress is anticipated. Investment bank JPMorgan expects underlying pre-tax profit to rise from $639m in 2011 to $11.1bn and to then soar to $21.1bn in 2013. Even a $32bn slide in the size of the average loan book during the year to end-June to $907bn isn't so grim. Management is refocusing on core operations and over $50bn-worth of non-core assets have been offloaded since Brian Moynihan became the chief executive in 2010. He's also hacking at costs and expects $3bn of savings by mid-2015. The US economy may help, too. True, with 8.1 per cent of its workforce unemployed, it is hardly booming, but at least it's growing - and that's good news for credit demand and credit quality. In contrast to the recession-hit UK and eurozone economies, the US economy grew 1.7 per cent in the second quarter and the IMF expects 2.25 per cent growth in 2013. Admittedly, a combination of rising taxes and spending cuts due at the year-end - the so-called fiscal cliff - could undermine that. But policy makers may rethink those measures, while another dose of quantitative easing in the US, which may have been announced by the time you read this, would boost confidence

Bellway has managed to grow sales even outside the south-east, while improvements to profit margins should be underpinned by rising prices and greater use of cheap land. True, the shares don't offer much in the way of income, then again the chief reason to buy is to capture short-term gains in the run up to the results

Bellway has also been busy opening new sites. This has helped to grow average weekly reservations from 93 to 101, which has been achieved without resorting to extra sales incentives, while less profitable equity-sharing deals have been restricted to less than 7 per cent of total reservations. However, a scarcity of affordable mortgages remains a drag on sales, which are still well short of the 7,638 made in 2007. The government’s NewBuy scheme has contributed just 133 reservations since it was launched in March - that's less than seven a week - and it remains unclear whether this will develop sufficiently to be able to kick-start the mortgage market, especially as banks are charging much higher interest rates on NewBuy mortgages. Trading since the financial year end has slowed a little, as it always does at this time of year, but Bellway's order book is up from 2,497 homes a year earlier to 2,533, worth some £441m.

UK housebuilders are in a sweet spot right now. Massive write downs on their land banks are history and all the major builders have cut their debt significantly. Building plots are cheap to buy, and recent efforts by the government may even see the planning process speeded up. Meanwhile, demand and house prices remain remarkably resilient despite the scarcity of affordable mortgages. But let's not forget that output remains on 'tick over' compared with the heady days before the financial crash. So housebuilders have been delivering some impressive performances this year and just one, Newcastle-based Bellway, has yet to report full-year figures. These are due on 16 October, and we reckon there is some mileage left in its the share price between now and then. True, the share price has just hit its 12-month high, but it's still barely more than published book value and still below the 986p net asset value (NAV) forecast by broker Investec Securities for the end of 2012-13. Trading for the year just ended has delivered decent growth, with completions up by 6.2 per cent to 5,226. What’s more, most of the increase came from building private homes, where selling prices are higher and profit margins fatter. This helped push Bellway's average selling prices up by over 6 per cent to around £187,000, and the company's bosses reckon that operating margins are likely to shoot ahead from 8.5 per cent last year to at least 11 per cent. Progress has been helped by greater use of recently acquired - and therefore cheap - land. Bellway increased its spending on land from £250m to £305m, most of which was acquired in the more prosperous south-east. However, its debt is minimal and it has a £300m facility in place to pursue further land purchases.

The software and IT services business specialising in the manufacturing and multi-channel retail markets issued another encouraging trading update with the Group’s multi-channel retail software division, boosted by two large orders from new customers, driving new business growth.

Waterlogic's Chief Executive Officer Jeremy Ben-David said: "As with previous years, the board expects the group to experience a H2 weighting in terms of revenue. Although the economic outlook remains challenging, especially in Europe, we remain well positioned to continue to expand and invest in our operations, make attractive acquisitions and deliver growth." Net cash surged from $1.1m to $37m during the period.

Purified water dispenser maker Waterlogic saw revenues rise by nearly a fifth in the first half but the group did note a worrying drop in business-to-business (B2B) indirect channel sales. Revenue increased by 19.2% from $39m to $46.5m during the six months to June 30th. Waterlogic said that organic revenue growth in B2B direct, and rental and service channels was "healthy" at 10% and 18%, respectively, though this was offset by the B2B indirect channel which saw organic revenues decline 13% on the back of difficult macroeconomic conditions. The group saw signifiant destocking by distributors with a major European client not ordering products in the first half. Indirect sales in the US meanwhile, continued to be affected by the restructuring of a major customer. Nevertheless, B2B direct, rental and service revenues accounted for 37% of total revenue in the first half, compared with 32% the year before. Adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation (EBITDA) fell 24.1% from $5.9m to $4.5m do "significant" business-to-consumer (B2C) start-up costs, operating expenses within acquired businesses and an increased cost base reflective of a listed entity on AIM (the company listed last summer). The group swung to a reported loss before tax of $0.2m compared with a profit of $2.27m last year, mainly due to higher administrative expenses. The gross margin increased to 59.7%, from 57.1% in the first half of 2011 and 59.2% at the end of the year.

Investors in property investment firm Redefine have showed their displeasure at the company's plan to launch heavily discounted new shares. The firm said it would raise £127m through the issue of over 490m new shares to pay down debt and create investment opportunities. The issue price of 26p represents a discount of 7.5p - over 22% - to the closing price of 33.5p per share on the close of trade on Wednesday, the day before the details were released. "The board remains confident of the group's long term growth prospects but, in order to achieve this growth, the group needs to reduce its financial leverage and create a stable long-term capital structure," the statement said. It added the capital raised was expected to provide a long-term stable capital structure from which a sustainable dividend could be distributed. This wasn't enough to assuage shareholders who pushed shares down 9%. The price move came despite the offer having the support of the company's largest shareholder, Redefine Properties International, which holds approximately 71.7%. of the company's ordinary shares.

Dewhurst, an independent supplier of quality components to the lift, keypad and transport industries, has said its pre-tax profit for the year ended September 30th will be significantly ahead of market expectations, which is largely due to better-than-expected sales both in the UK and overseas. Jared Sinclair, Finance Director, said: "Despite the concerns reported in the interims of market fragility, demand has remained healthy through the second half, resulting in the group performing better than expected."