Ian
thanks, never knew that existed. By chance are ex divi dates normally on Wednesdays. tried a few futures dates and would appear so.
Alex

End-of-day Market Overview

Alex - ex dividend dates are almost always Wednesday - although a handful of companies do have different dates. I can't recall any of the FTSE350 companies having a different day from Wednesday though.

In my experience there can be gaps in ex-div stocks depending on the provider - it's best to check a second source of dates such as Digital Look. Sometimes they will be missing information as well. It's not uncommon here for us to be poised to jump into a stock which is down and out of range on a Wednesday morning, and have searched RNS messages to find it's ex-dividend when nobody had it listed. So this kind of information can be a bit hit and miss sometimes.

There used to be a lot of scope for dividend plays a few years ago but I'm not sure of the attraction now.