What's in store today...

With oil prices barely out of the headlines over the first eight months of the year, it will be interesting to see how energy giant Cairn Energy (CNE) has fared.

Sanjeev Bahl, analyst at Numis, forecasts revenues of $1.64 billion (c.£0.99 billion) and operating profit of $1.2 billion, although he cautions that these figures could be impacted by items relating to the Vedanta (VED) deal.

"In the worst-case scenario, under which the Vedanta deal fails to complete and Cairn's 2011 Greenland programme is written off, we have a net asset value of 302p per share. With the stock trading at 312p per share we see minimal downside and believe that Cairn is relatively defensive in a falling oil price environment."

G4S (GFS) also makes an appearance today and in a statement released in back in May, noted that growth in its PES would be back to pre-recession levels by the end of next year. Investors will therefore no doubt be looking for signs of this development.

While its rivals announce major contract wins, they will also be holding out for some good news on this front. The blue chip company has added some decent contracts to its belt recently, in particular with Royal Dutch Shell (RDSB) and Chevron (CVX).

But despite this, the group has been out of favour with some analysts recently and faced downgrades. Tuesday's interim statement will therefore be the company's opportunity to try and put itself firmly back in the good books.

Meanwhile, CBI publishes its industrial trends survey on the economic front and unfortunately for markets, looks set to give a very downbeat message on the near-term prospects for the manufacturing recovery.

The news on global demand for manufactured goods has been particularly weak of late. As a result, economists at Capital Economics have pencilled in an a sharp fall in the output expectations balance from +6 to -10 in August.

Tuesday 23 August

Results

(Interim) Capital & Regional, Capital Drilling, Chime Communications, Cairn Energy, Corin Group, G4S, H&T Group, Hiscox, Persimmon, Severfield-Rower, Spirax-Sarco Engineering, Spectris, UK Coal, John Wood Group

AGM/EGM

Livermore Investments Group, Omega Diagnostics Group.