LONDON (ShareCast) - (Sharecast News) - Investors are likely to be in a holding pattern on Tuesday ahead of the release of quarterly results out of Apple and Microsoft in the evening.






In the meantime, they will be digesting the latest numbers out of Facebook, which will publish results on Monday night.

According to Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets UK, investors are watching to see if the recent privacy changes introduced by Apple were hurting business.

Snap had warned of precisely that during just the week before.

"Could Snap be the canary in the coal mine for a Facebook miss?," Hewson mused out loud.

"Profits for Q3 are still expected to come in at a relatively healthy $3.16c a share."

At 1100 BST the Confederation of British Industry will publish its distributive trades index for October.

Stateside meanwhile, investors will be digesting survey readings for house prices in August, alongside new home sales figures for September.

Across the Channel, the European Central Bank is due to publish the results of its bank lending survey for the third quarter.

Further afield, in South Korea, the spotlight will be on third quarter gross domestic product data.

For Softcat's full-year results, consensus is for earnings before interest and taxes to print at £116m.

At its third quarter update in May, the IT infrastructure specialist's management guided towards EBIT broadly in line with the previous financial year.

UBS analyst Jad Younes expects investors will be keen to understand whether supply chain shortages are hurting the company and if the outlook for 2022 will be impacted.

"With government financial support being lifted in the UK, scrutiny will also likely be on if there is any slowdown of SMB demand and if higher insolvency risks were starting to materialize," Younes added.

The analyst had penciled-in 2021 EBIT of £115m for earnings per share of 46.0p on margins of 9.3%, declining to 8.7% in 2022 and 8.5% in 2023.

He also noted how the company's shares were trading on an estimated price-to-earnings multiple of 41.7 times for 2022, versus a historical average of 25.6.

Tuesday 26 October

INTERIMS

e-Therapeutics

INTERIM DIVIDEND PAYMENT DATE

Morgan Sindall Group

INTERNATIONAL ECONOMIC ANNOUNCEMENTS

Consumer Confidence (US) (15:00)

House Price Index (US) (14:00)

New Homes Sales (US) (15:00)

Q3

Reckitt Benckiser Group

TRADING ANNOUNCEMENTS

RWS Holdings

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