It has been a year since Hipgnosis Songs Fund first announced its intention to float on London's Main Market. After a failed attempt to float last summer the trust is back again with a lower profile listing.The investment trust, which wants to take advantage ofa shift from CDs to music streaming, aims to raise £200m at 100p per share when it becomes a public company on 11 July under the...

Serviced office provider IWG (IWG) has received an indicative takeover proposal from Brookfield Asset Management and Onex Corporation. The approach follows recent share price weakness caused by a profit warning in October which wiped a third off IWG's market value.Oil producer Royal Dutch Shell (RDSB) said it should benefit from US tax changes primarily due to the reduction in the US corporate...

Former BBC chairman Michael Grade and his business partner Ivan Dunleavy are set to join the board of digital music rights business One Media IP (OMIP:AIM) after investing £375,000 (18 Dec).One Media has a catalogue of more than 250,000 'nostalgic' tracks. Part of what attracted Grade to One Media is its TCAT service which helps record companies root out copyright abuses. The shares gained...

The market sell-off over the past week or so has been very damaging for investors; so too our Plays of the Week portfolio. Seven trades have ended after their 20% stop losses were triggered. None of the seven companies issued bad news; the drop in their share prices were down to weak market sentiment, investors exiting riskier trades and declines in the oil price. The following Plays of the...

Discount retailer Poundland (PLND) - a running Shares Play of the Week - jumps 4.4% to 343.1p as investors like full-year results. Trading has been very good in the first three months of its new financial year with 18% rise in sales. Its trial store in Spain has launched this week.Drug-maker Shire (SHP) improves 1% to £45.93 on newspaper gossip suggests would-be suitor AbbVie (ABBV:NDQ) is...

News that music streaming site Spotify has 10 million paying subscribers and over 40 million active users has significant read-across to rights specialist One Media IP (OMIP:AIM). As the owner of a growing catalogue of nostalgia-era songs, the small cap is well placed to profit from the structural shift for listening to music streamed via the internet instead of CDs or the radio. With Google...

The forthcoming launch of YouTube's subscription music and video service should be good news for One Media IP (OMIP:AIM) which owns the rights to a feast of nostalgia-era songs. The £7.8 million cap already makes a good living from royalties every time someone plays one of its songs via online music streaming site Spotify. The earnings upside potential from YouTube is significant as the...

City gossips drag up takeover talk around Vodafone (VOD) on Friday, egging its shares 2% higher to 229.1p, with US giant AT&T (T:NYSE) in the frame according to Bloomberg reports. This is not new news, as Shares first flagged the potential for AT&T to use Vodafone as a route to bolster expansion in Europe more than six weeks ago.Part state-owned lender Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) dives 4.5%...

While your average FTSE 100 company may have very little in common with the UK economy it is no accident that many of these corporate Goliaths are domiciled in Britain and traded on the London Stock Exchange's (LSE) Main Market. Put simply they were once small companies that have had great success and now operate on a global scale.One example is GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). It can trace it genesis...

The technology sector has taken a big hit with several profit warnings. Leading the pack is language translation specialist SDL (SDL) which crashed 34% to 256p after saying that its earnings would be much less than previously expected. The new profits steer of £15 million to £20 million halves previous hopes, sparking some City watchers to ponder if there are deeper problems under SDL's...

Micro-cap content specialist One Media (OMIP:AIM) could enjoy a rerating following last week's (18 Apr) move from the ICAP Securities & Derivatives Exchange to Aim. This is likely to happen as market awareness of the group and its growth potential improves on the junior market.The profitable and cash-generative £5 million market cap should come onto the radar of institutional investors given...