Our share tips were in sparkling form again last week as financial markets demonstrated their resilience in the face of the latest terrorist attacks.
All four of our portfolios continued their recent good run with the 2016 and 2015 selections both recording gains of more than 2.0 per cent and the others up by approaching 1.0 per cent when we carried out our usual review on Wednesday morning.
Virtually all of our selections made some progress although BT continued to slide on regulatory concerns over its Openreach operations and Stagecoach weakened further on doubts over growth prospects for the jointly-run Virgin East Coast franchise.
Both shares are now in danger of falling to our published stop loss targets and we will certainly dispose of our notional holdings on any further significant weakness.
Against that, we had some big gainers with National Grid and Royal Mail moving smartly higher as investors sought out 'safe' dividend payers and Legal & General enjoying fresh investment support after its recent figures.
But the stand-out performance came from building trade supplier Marshalls which rose another 8 per cent over the week to take the total gain to approaching 30 per cent since the shares were added to the 2016 portfolio on February 14.
The re-rating encouraged us to look at others in the sector and we made a notional purchase of shares in Anglo-Scottish construction industry supplier Breedon Aggregates for the 2014 portfolio on Wednesday morning.
The group, which has a £55 million contract to supply materials for the Aberdeen city by-pass, produced a robust trading update earlier this month despite the impact of flooding on major Scottish contracts.
The real attraction, though, is its planned £336 million acquisition of the Hope group which is expected to receive regulatory approval in the next few weeks and will catapult Breedon to the number one spot in building supplies in time to take advantage of government pledges to increase infrastructure spending.
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