These are the most-traded shares across UK markets last week. The figures provide a great insight into the way investors are thinking and where there could be opportunities.

While this information is only a small sample of the UK stockmarket, it can provide a great starting point for further research.

Most-bought blue-chip stocks

Top five most bought FTSE 100 shares according to the UK’s largest online stockbroker, Hargreaves Lansdown:

The most-bought list of FTSE 100 stocks has been dominated by resource companies in recent weeks. However, last week it seems there was a big change in investor sentiment.

Commodity stocks are now seemingly out of favour. They’ve been replaced by blue-chip utilities, telecom, healthcare and retail.

Water is one of the market’s most defensive sectors. Not only is there always a demand for water, but most companies have a monopoly over the regions they operate. They’re also usually able to hike bills in line with inflation. This makes them the perfect stocks to own to weather inflationary forces, which might explain why United Utilities was one of the most-bought FTSE 100 stocks last week.

GSK and Haleon also proved popular following sudden share price falls. Both companies are exposed to litigation related to the heartburn drug Zantac. This could lump the companies with multi-billion dollar legal bills, and the market has been selling the stocks rather than risk exposure to rising costs.

Most-bought small and mid-cap stocks

The most-bought non-blue-chip stocks on the Freetrade, IG Group and Hargreaves Lansdown platforms in no particular order:

It was a quiet week for small and mid-cap stocks last week.

Revolution Beauty Group bucked the trend, earning itself a place on the list of the most-bought stocks even though the firm warned investors that it could have to restate its financial position.

In a trading update published on 11 August, the company told investors that its auditors have “raised certain accounting issues with management,” in preparation of its accounts for the period ending 28 February.

The update noted that these issues could “have a material impact on the results,” although it is confident that its financial position reported at the end of July (net debt of £21.2m) is reliable and there’s plenty of headroom on its borrowing facilities to provide “sufficient liquidity” for the future.

Most-bought investment trusts

Top five most bought investment trusts according to Barclays Smart Investor:

Scottish Mortgage remained the most popular investment trust on the Barclays Smart Investor platform. But the others on the list suggest investors are preparing for a period of prolonged uncertainty, and they seem to be sheltering in trusts with exposure to green energy.

Greencoat UK Wind owns and operates a portfolio of wind farms around the UK. Meanwhile, the Renewables Infrastructure Group owns and operates a portfolio of renewable energy assets. In an increasingly uncertain economic climate, with rising hydrocarbon prices, money is flooding into green energy assets, which have the potential to offer secure, inflation-linked returns as well as a steady income for investors.

Sources:

https://www.hl.co.uk/shares/top-of-the-stocks

https://www.ig.com/uk/shares/most-traded-stocks-uk

https://freetrade.io/most-traded-shares#uk-most-traded-shares

https://www.barclays.co.uk/smart-investor/investments/most-popular/investment-trusts/

SEE ALSO:

Britain’s ten most-hated shares

Director dealings what company insiders are buying and selling

Oil prices have risen sharply since the outbreak of the conflict in Iran, and the chances are that you’ve felt the consequences in your portfolio as well as at the pump. But some investments can offer at least a measure of protection against higher oil prices.

Brent Crude oil futures have closed above $90 every day since 11 March, with the conflict in Iran having effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz – a critical shipping lane through which around 20% of the world’s oil passes.

“The huge disruption to oil and natural gas supplies in the Middle East over the past three months has materially tightened energy markets near-term,” said Mark Hume, co-manager of BlackRock Energy and Resources Income Trust. “The impact on liquified natural gas exports, primarily to Asia, has been even more pronounced.”

When oil prices rise, some of your other investments are likely to fall.

Given most of the world’s industry relies on oil and gas as inputs, higher oil prices have caused chaos in most stock markets and economies.

But high oil prices aren’t bad news for everyone. Some companies – such as oil and energy suppliers – could profit from higher oil prices.

British oil major BP (LON:BP.), for example, reported on 28 April that its underlying replacement cost profit (a measure commonly used by oil and gas companies that factors out inventory gains and losses) more than doubled to $3.2 billion in the year to Q1 2026.

BP’s profit jump was boosted by higher prices, according to Mark Crouch, market analyst at investment platform eToro.

“In many respects, BP has both absorbed and benefited from the same geopolitical tensions, with volatility once again proving a tailwind for an integrated major,” said Crouch.

Its success saw BP make the list of the most popular stocks among DIY investors using Interactive Investor’s platform during May.

How else can you profit from oil and energy price rises, and compensate for all the increased cost that rising energy bills and petrol prices bring?

The risks of investing in oil

Before going into how to invest in oil and energy you should remember that, as recent events have proven, oil prices are highly volatile.

“Investing [in oil and energy] via an exchange-traded product (ETF) that aims to follow the price can risk being whipsawed,” said Rob Morgan, chief investment analyst at Charles Stanley Direct.

Morgan also cautioned that many investors might already have reasonable oil exposure within their portfolios, if (for example) they hold assets tracking the FTSE 100 which includes several oil majors like Shell (LON:SHEL) and BP.

“It is important to avoid unwittingly doubling up on exposure,” said Morgan.

How to invest for higher oil prices

That said, it could make sense, depending on where else you are invested, to allocate a small part of your portfolio to focused oil investments in order to shield yourself from price shocks and the consequent inflation.

“Energy equities can protect a portfolio in certain inflationary scenarios but can also underperform for long stretches when the commodity cycle turns or policy shifts,” said Morgan. “This is why they should generally only be held in small quantities, for instance up to 5%.”

As well as holding oil price-friendly assets, it is also important to remain diversified.

“Diversification and explicit geopolitical hedges remain essential,” said Daniel Casali, chief investment strategist at wealth manager Evelyn Partners. “These include gold, hedge funds, inflation‑linked bonds, short‑duration sovereign bonds and energy equities.”

If you feel your portfolio could do with a barrel or two of extra oil price exposure, then there are several ways you can add it:

• Oil and energy stocks like Shell, BP or Harbour Energy (LON:HBR). These stocks gained 5.8%,19.8% and 12.5% respectively between 27 February and 27 April.
• Funds or ETFs that invest in oil and energy companies, offering diversified exposure to stocks like these. Some examples are the SPDR MSCI Europe Energy UCITS ETF (LON:ENGE), which tracks large- and medium-cap energy companies in Europe, and the iShares Oil and Gas Production UCITS ETF (LON:SPOG), which has a broader international footprint (nearly three quarters of holdings are based in the US and Canada, with most of the rest hailing from Australia, Japan and Norway).
• An exchange-traded commodity (ETC) can act as a simple way to track the oil price. One example is WisdomTree WTI Crude Oil (LON:CRUP), which offers investors total return exposure to WTI Crude Oil futures contracts.

Additionally, several investment trusts offer exposure to oil and energy companies. These include:

^{Source: theaic.co.uk / Morningstar (as at 21/05/2026 based on latest available published portfolio weights).}

Calls have been growing for the government to impose a windfall tax on UK oil and gas producers to help ease the cost of living crisis. According to the Financial Times, Rishi Sunak may even go further and impose a windfall tax on more than £10bn of “excess” profits by electricity generators, including wind farm operators as well as hydrocarbon producers.

Such a tax would go well beyond initial proposals, and is likely to have a huge impact on the UK energy sector. While it might be popular politically, analysts have warned that a windfall tax could hurt investment and the UK’s international business reputation.

Unsurprisingly, the market has reacted pretty negatively to speculation that power generators such as SSE (LSE: SSE), Drax Group (LSE: DRX), Centrica (LSE: CNA), Greencoat Wind (LSE: UKW) and others might be dragged into the tax net. These companies have already laid out big spending plans for the next few years to help the UK meet its climate targets. Today’s windfall profits will help them meet these capital spending obligations; they won’t if they’re confiscated.

How will a windfall tax hit corporate profits?

At this point, it’s hard to say what, if any, effect a new tax will have on the sector. The Labour Party estimates that a tax on North Sea oil producers would raise £2bn. Greenpeace UK claims the sector will earn windfall profits of £11.6bn this year, suggesting a tax rate of around 17%. A similar take on the £10bn of estimated excess profits of electricity generators suggests a bill of £1.7bn for the sector.

Offshore Energies UK (OEUK) has already estimated that UK oil and gas operators will pay £7.8bn in tax this year, a 20-fold increase in 12 months.

A one-off charge is likely to have the biggest effect on power generator Drax. According to Citi analysts it is “one of the most operationally geared to a fall in commodity prices and/or political intervention in the power sector.” Drax is the UK’s biggest producer of renewable power by output, although it was recently asked by the government to fire up some of its legacy coal power plants to “stabilise the power system during periods of stress”.

Last year adjusted earnings totalled £398m. This year management expects Drax to earn between £540m and £606m. Most green energy companies receive subsidies from the government to help fund the cost of developing renewable projects. These agreements generally fix the price these businesses can charge consumers, with any upside going back to the government.

Drax operates under a different agreement. It benefits from so-called “renewable obligation certificates,” which allow it to keep any upside. This is another reason the firm could be more exposed than most to a windfall tax.

It is also developing carbon capture technology in an effort to generate large-scale “negative emissions”. This year’s outsize profits will help the company fund these plans (carbon capture is notoriously expensive and complex to implement), but if they’re taken away, the company will have to find another source of cash. That could mean more debt or lower shareholder returns.

Of course, we won’t know which corporations will be hit the hardest until details of the plan are announced. Susannah Streeter at Hargreaves Lansdown believes that any windfall tax would be “linked to the amount of cash poured into ESG initiatives to power the energy transition” and “measures taken by companies to ease the burden of high bills for cash strapped customers”.

That indicates that businesses such as SSE, which is investing £12.5bn over the next five years to accelerate its net zero strategy, should get off relatively lightly (there’s also an argument to be made here that Drax could escape the worst as well as a result of its investments).

Big Oil could be sheltered from a one-off levy

There are bigger questions around how the tax would work in practice. Big oil companies such as Shell (LSE: SHEL) and BP (LSE: BP) are making vast profits, but mostly outside of the UK.

Shell paid no tax on its UK oil and gas production last year even though it earned $21bn in net income overall. BP expects to pay £1bn tax on its North Sea profits this year, while analysts are predicting an overall net income of £16bn, an equivalent tax rate of 6.3%. But international earnings would be very difficult to tax.

So how should investors react to this latest threat? The best solution may be to do nothing – yet. As the US investor Peter Lynch once said, “far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections, or trying to anticipate corrections, than has been lost in corrections themselves.”

We don’t know what the government will propose, nor do we know if it will actually go ahead with it. Indeed, the backlash from business has already been fierce, and nothing concrete has been proposed.

Moreover, any tax will only be on a percentage of profits. Unless the tax rate is 100% (which seems unlikely) companies will still earn a windfall from high energy prices. And as the government is working hard to encourage investment in renewable energy, there’s bound to be some loopholes in any proposed regime.

Ultimately, a windfall tax is unlikely to hit the long-term outlook for green organisations such as Greencoat UK Wind, which is one of the largest wind energy investors in the UK. A one-off tax is also unlikely to hurt Shell and BP significantly considering their international footprints.

On the other hand, North Sea producers such as Harbour Energy (LSE: HBR) seem more exposed to a UK producer tax, as does Drax, considering its position in the country’s electricity market.

But whatever course of action the government decides to take, it’s unlikely to significantly alter the long-term outlook for those companies with strong balance sheets, international diversification and green growth plans. I’d concentrate on these businesses not just today but for the next decade and beyond.

 Shell has been one of the best-performing investments in the FTSE 100 over the past three years. Including dividends, the stock has returned 28% per annum, compared to 11.8% for the blue-chip index since mid-2020. 

The company has benefited from surging oil and gas prices, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the beginning of 2022, although that’s not the only factor. The pandemic crushed demand for oil and gas, but when the economy reopened, production could not keep up with demand and prices jumped. 

Today, we are still seeing the impact of this sudden jump in demand, as well as the impact on the market from Russia’s warmongering.

Shell’s fortunes start to turn  

Sadly, for Shell’s investors, it looks as if the run of bumper earnings is coming to an end. The group reported its lowest quarterly profit in almost two years today after oil and gas prices fell. More importantly, refining profit margins also slumped and this arm has been a key profit engine for the group - Shell is one of Europe’s largest hydrocarbon refiners and oil traders.

The company reported adjusted earnings of $5.1 billion for the second quarter, below analyst expectations of $5.6 billion. In comparison, in the second quarter of 2022, Shell generated earnings of $11.5 billion.

These results illustrate the challenge the company and its investors face. Oil and gas is a highly cyclical and risky business. There are many different factors which go into pricing hydrocarbons and no single producer has any impact on the market price.

And I’m not just talking about oil and gas here. I’m also talking about refined products. All of these markets are global and hypercompetitive, meaning no one business can take advantage to try and earn consistently higher profits.

This is the reason why I think Shell will always trade at a discount to the rest of the market. 

Based on current projections, the stock is trading at a forward price-to-earnings (p/e) multiple of 7.3 according to Refinitiv analyst estimates. That looks attractive. However, if oil and gas prices fall in the second half of the year company will have to make do with lower earnings. Then the lower multiple won’t look so outrageous.

Still, where the company can make decisions to boost its profits and cash flows it is. It has revealed plans to reduce capital spending from a range of $23 billion to $27 billion dollars down to $23 billion dollars to $26 billion dollars, it has also laid out plans to reduce costs from operations to improve profit margins.

Cash flow boost for shareholders 

The company has made substantial strides in reducing its debt over the past couple of years, using extraordinary profits to pay off credit or obligations. Net debt has fallen from $78 billion at the end of 2019 to $40 billion at the end of June 2023. With interest rates spiking, it looks as if this was the right decision and should save the company billions of dollars in interest payments.

The group has also been using its windfall to reward shareholders. It increased its quarterly dividend by 15% for the second quarter of 2023 and has committed to repurchase $3 billion in shares by the end of October. Over the past 18 months, the group distributed $26 billion to shareholders representing almost 10% of its market value through a combination of dividends and share repurchases. The stock offers a dividend yield of 4.6% today. 

The bottom line  

 So what does this all mean for investors? The numbers clearly show this is a cyclical business where earnings can jump up and down. Shell has made a lot of money over the past two or three years, and it has used this cash wisely, but it’s unclear if the company will be able to repeat this performance as its future will be determined by the state of the global oil market. 

That’s something investors need to keep in mind if they’re considering adding this stock to their portfolio. 

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Last week Royal Dutch Shell cut its dividend for the first time since World War II, says Anjli Raval in the Financial Times. The payout for the first quarter was slashed from 47 cents to 16. No wonder. Not only did profits for the first three months of the year fall from $5.3bn last year to $2.9bn in 2020, but the oil major thinks that the situation will be “more severe” in the second quarter, with oil prices already down to $24 a barrel. The shares sank by 11% on the news.

The scale of the cut suggests that Shell believes that the crisis isn’t just a short-term event, but will cause “permanent change” in customers’ behaviour, say Anna Edwards and Laura Hurst on Bloomberg. The long-term impact on the way consumers work and travel “could be even more devastating for the industry” than the initial turmoil. Attitudes toward oil have been changing for some time “as the world shifts gradually toward cleaner forms of energy”.

The oil major’s dilemma

The rise of activism presented Shell with a dilemma, says Jeremy Warner in The Daily Telegraph. With shareholders under pressure from climate change campaigners, the dividend was the only thing keeping them on board, so the cut gives investors “another excuse to sell”. However, with the world “moving away from dependence on hydrocarbons”, maintaining the dividend would have forced them to sell off assets “until there [was] nothing left”.

Viewed in this context, cutting the dividend was the only way to free up cash to meet its goal of transitioning to a carbon-neutral company by 2050. “Butchering the dividend” was clearly the “correct move”, since it will save Shell $10bn a year at a time when oil prices have collapsed, says Nils Pratley in The Guardian. However, rather than congratulating themselves for making a tough decision, Shell’s management should have expressed a little “remorse” over the fact that Shell has spent $16bn buying back its own shares since July 2018. The fact that the buybacks took place when Shell’s shares were trading at £22, compared with today’s £13, makes them even more wasteful. After all, it’s not as if Shell’s balance sheet was “unencumbered by debt” at the time.

Whatever Shell’s past failings, the American oil giants ExxonMobil and Chevron have something to learn from it, says Lauren Silva Laughlin on Breakingviews. Instead of doing some “soul searching”, the duo are “playing a game of chicken” with shareholders by continuing to pay their dividends. While both companies acknowledge that there is pressure for a “green world” in rich countries, they still believe that “the middle class in emerging economies will flourish, pushing up the demand for fossil fuels”. This is a risky strategy given that even last year both companies were making paltry returns on capital employed: only 6.5% at Exxon while Chevron’s figure “was a lowly 2%”.

Of all the takeover rumours that constantly ride the City merry-go-round, the idea that Royal Dutch Shell would one day buy BG has to be one of the most persistent.

And now it's no longer a rumour.

Shell is buying BG for the equivalent of £13.50 a share. That's roughly 50% over and above the prevailing share price before the news came out.

That's great news if you're a relatively recent BG shareholder, clearly. What the rest of us want to know now is who's next?

This is one of the biggest deals ever

On another interesting point, James Mackintosh notes in his FT column that the Shell BG deal is the ninth-biggest merger deal ever. That's not good company to keep five of the top ten were tech-bubble era deals, and three came just before the Lehman Brothers bust. In other words, this sort of scale of deal tends to happen before crashes.

However, while I'd agree that shares in general are overvalued, it's hard to make the case that this specific instance is about chief executive ego gone mad. Instead, it looks Shell is taking advantage of the plunging oil price to make a move.

Why is Shell buying BG? If there's one thing an oil and gas company needs, it's a plentiful source of oil and gas for the future. And the simple answer is that, right now, it's easier and cheaper to buy BG than for Shell to find more of its own reserves.

The BG deal will increase Shell's oil and gas reserves by around 25%. And it'll boost production by 20%. According to the FT, by 2018, Shell could be producing more oil and gas than ExxonMobil currently the biggest non-state producer. It's already the global leader in liquefied natural gas, and this deal will cement that.

That's good news for Shell. By comparison to some of the other big players, Shell has had problems replacing the reserves it has already pumped out.

BG directors have recommended the deal, and it's likely to be completed by early 2016. If you own BG, it's probably worth hanging on for now at least you never know, someone else might fancy coming in with a higher bid.

As for the rest of the sector, the big question now has to be who's next?

We're going to see a wave of mergers in the oil sector

In other words, expect more mergers and takeovers. ExxonMobil has already mentioned that it's open to the idea of doing deals. And Bob Dudley at BP noted that he expected the oil price environment to remain similar to the 1980s, which is when many of the mega-mergers that shaped today's oil giants took place.

The other point to remember is that chief executives are just like everyone else. They see action and they start to panic they want to be part of it. Their shareholders will be asking why they're not doing deals too. Fee-hungry bankers will be putting ideas in their heads. Their own egos will look enviously on the praise being heaped on Shell boss Ben van Beurden by an excitable press.

As the BG deal shows, pretty much no one is safe. Even a big player like BP has frequently been cited as a possible target you have to imagine that someone out there is running the slide rule over it.

And elsewhere in the sector, all those funds out there with money to spend on distressed' assets will now be looking to act before someone else does. The last thing they want is takeover fever driving up prices and leaving them stranded.

So regardless of what happens to the oil price and with Iran coming back online potentially, we could be looking at a suppressed price for quite some time it looks like share prices in the sector are set to benefit from a wave of speculation.

We looked at the oil sector, and flagged up some potential ways to play a merger boom, in a recent issue of MoneyWeek magazine. Subscribers can read the piece here and if you're not already a subscriber, sign up to get your first four issues free here.

Shares in Royal Dutch Shell took a hit this morning as the oil major issued its first profit warning in ten years.

As the company's new chief executive, Ben van Beurden, put it: "our 2013 performance was not what I expect from Shell".

Adjusted earnings (which exclude one-off items and changes in the value of oil inventories) fell to around $2.9bn in the fourth quarter of 2013. That's down from $5.6bn the year before, and well below analysts' expectations of $4.9bn.

So what's the problem? Should you sell? Or is this a minor buying opportunity?

Shell seems to have taken hits in most parts of its operations. As far as the business of finding and producing oil goes (its upstream' operations), exploration expenses were up, production volumes were down, and oil prices were broadly flat which all adds up to lower profits.

Meanwhile, production of high-value oil and gas including gas-to-liquid operations and liquefied natural gas was hit hard by maintenance activity in the last three months of 2013. Exploration and production in the Americas remains loss-making. And in Nigeria, where output has suffered because of oil thefts, security conditions "remained challenging".

The downstream operations such as refining (turning oil into other goods) and distribution (for example, petrol stations) didn't have a good quarter either. The company suffered from "significantly weaker industry refining conditions", especially in Asia and Europe, where there's lots of over-capacity.

In fact, conditions are so bad, say company executives quoted by the FT, that Shell loses $10 for every barrel it refines in Singapore.

Don't panic this looks like kitchen sinking'

However, it's recovered a bit since (trading down 2% early in the afternoon). And that makes sense: long-term investors should hold their nerve and hang on to their Shell shares or even buy some if you haven't already.

Why? Well, the company seems determined to keep shareholders happy: in the third quarter, it raised its dividend by two cents to $0.45 a share. It will announce interim dividends for the fourth quarter on 30 January. That's one to watch to see whether it will cut the dividend in light of the profit warning.

But that seems both unlikely and unnecessary dividend cover on pre-warning earnings was a reasonably healthy 2.1 times. That puts it on a dividend yield of more than 5%, a good deal more than the average FTSE 100 stock.

Moreover, the dividend is paid in dollars. The greenback has been strengthening as the Fed has slowed down its money-printing obviously, currencies can move down as well as up, but the US dollar seems a good one to have exposure to right now.

In any case, the profit warning might ultimately prove a good thing the new boss getting all the bad stuff out of the way before he turns the company around. As Malcolm Graham-Wood, oil specialist and founding partner at Hydrocarbon Capital said on his blog (www.malcysblog.com), this looks like a case of an incoming chief executive deciding "to clear the decks and leave himself a decent starting point to what might be ten years in the job".

My colleague Phil Oakley wrote in more depth about Royal Dutch Shell in a recent issue of MoneyWeek magazine and he hasn't changed his mind on the stock. If you're not already a subscriber, you can subscribe to MoneyWeek magazine.

Shell'sbeing shunned by the City, but its tasty dividend yield looks safe, says Phil Oakley.

Shell is the most valuable company on the British stock market and one of the biggest oil firms in the world. However, despite its size, investors have had a lot to put up with over the last decade or so.

That's because the company has been spending a lot of time trying to put right a number of self-inflicted problems.

Back in 2004 it was embroiled in a scandal when it told investors it had greater reserves of oil and gas than it actually did. It has taken a long time to recover the loss of trust that ensued.

Shell also suffered because it failed to invest for the future. Unlike BP, it did not spend money hoovering up other oil companies, nor did it put enough money into finding more oil and gas around the world.

Without investment in good projects, many feared it would not have enough money to keep on paying decent dividends.

In recent years Shell has been trying to make up for lost time. It is spending around $30bn a year on new oil and gas projects. The problem it faces is that the stock market fears this spending might not pay off. Consequently, Shell's share price has gone nowhere for the last three years.

Can it deliver the goods? Or is it destined to become a corporate dinosaur that investors don't need to bother with?

Shell's troubled growth strategy

The whole point of investing is to get a decent return on the money you spend. Getting it wrong can have disastrous effects on the value of a company and the fortunes of investors' savings plans. Unfortunately, people are not confident that Shell will get it right.

The City worries it may be spending too much. The cost of extracting oil and gas is rising, while the amount of money it can be sold for isn't. This is not what you need when you are trying to grow profits and cash flows.

Bears point to the fact that Shell has sunk $24bn into US shale-gas assets that have yet to turn a profit. Investments here have been written down in value.

Large amounts of money spent in Alaska have also produced disappointing results. Then there are the problems in Nigeria, which accounts for nearly 10% of what Shell produces. A lot of its oil is being stolen, which means lower profits and hassle.

To make things worse, Shell has also abandoned its target of producing four million barrels of oil per day. Instead, it says it will focus on its financial performance and growing cash flows. This has raised fears that Shell's growth strategy is in trouble.

But it's not all bad news

If it can get to $50bn of annual-trading cash flow by 2015, when investment spending might come down as well, then there should be plenty of spare cash to pay out to shareholders in the years ahead. The one caveat here is that the oil price has to stay at between $80 and $100 per barrel.

Shell is doing the right thing by putting more money into gas, where the growth prospects are better than oil. Some of its big projects, such as the gas-to-liquids plant in Qatar, are starting to do well as are investments in Malaysia and Australia.

Over the next two to three years, five big projects in areas such as the Gulf of Mexico, Iraq and Kazakhstan and in liquefied natural gas (LNG) are set to come on stream. These should add another $4bn to Shell's annual cash flow.

Another thing that should reassure investors is the company's strong financial position. Its debt as a percentage of money invested in the business (gearing) is a very low 10%, while the current level of profits is enough to pay the interest bill nearly 25 times over.

However, the best thing about Shell and its share price right now is that all the worrying about its future has left the shares looking rather cheap. City analysts are still expecting profits and dividends to keep on growing modestly.

With this in mind, the prospective price-to-earnings (p/e) ratio of 9.1 times suggests Shell's shares represent reasonable value.

Of much more interest is the dividend yield of 5.2%. This is covered more than twice by profits and looks safe at the moment. If Shell can deliver on its cash-flow targets then this payout should increase over the next few years.

However, as it is paid in dollars, what happens to the pound/dollar exchange rate will have some impact on what UK shareholders end up pocketing.

With banks typically paying paltry rates of interest on savings accounts, you could do a lot worse than buying shares in Shell, reinvesting your dividend payments and watching the value of your investment hopefully increase over the next five to ten years.

Yes, of course, the doom-mongers have some valid points. However, given that a lot of the possible disadvantages are already reflected in the current share price, stop worrying and put some Shell in your portfolio.

Verdict: buy for dividends

Interest cover

Dividend cover

Directors' shareholdings