U.K.

Natural gas is much in the news after Obama’s energy speech this week during which he showed support for this cheap and clean fuel, yet recent investor behavior is not one-way traffic in this regard. The medium term trend shows funds to be very positive towards natural gas businesses and negative towards U.S. coal companies but there could be some short term interruptions to this previously successful theme if recent activity (inspired by the warm winter) is anything to go by.

Last week’s profits warning by Thomas Cook Group Plc (LON:TCG) has put pressure on travel stocks as the news reverberated through the sector ahead of second quarter earnings updates. We use securities lending flow data to assess investor sentiment in the global travel sector.

Thomas Cook

Russian companies have raised almost USD 2 billion in the first four months of 2011 through London IPOs, surpassing the total of USD 1.7 billion in 2010. Despite the popularity, the drop out rate has been high with only five Russian companies having listed in London this year. We use securities lending flow to identify which stocks are showing interesting investor sentiment and highlight Yandex along with two other recent floats of interest: Prada and Pandora Media.

There has been a sharp decline in UK retail sales, with June recording the weakest performance for a year, according to a report by the CBI employers group. Despite average short interest across the UK retail sector standing at a low 0.9% of total shares outstanding, almost a third of the sector displays high levels of short interest. Over in the U.S, the Retail sector saw the second highest frequency of stocks reaching new annual short interest highs over the past week in comparison to other sectors.

Home improvement takes a back seat