Welcome to the inaugural ‘Trades With Legs’ blog – a quick look at upcoming trading events in the equities markets. The aim (and only time will tell whether I suceed or not) is to highlight some trades that will run and run.

First up are William Hill and J. Sainsbury who both have results coming out tomorrow (Thursday).

Do the bookies always win? The chart for William Hill suggests not. The UK’s largest bookie will release a trading update tomorrow and profit forecasts are centred on £220-£230m.

Fears about discretionary consumer spending (i.e. how much spare cash the punters have) and the impact of the smoking ban loom. What’s more, rival bookies Corals and Ladbrokes have reluctantly signed a deal with a crowd called Turf TV which provide TV coverage of some the UK’s largest racecourses. That puts pressure on Hill to sign up too … and it could hurt. Brokers estimate that it will cost Hill and the others £5m to £10, which could knock an extra 5% of Hill’s pre-tax profits.

Ladbrokes, Hill’s nearest peer, saw a share price fall of over 10% accompany their trading update on the 15th November. Their gross revenue was down 5%, with bad weather causing race meetings to be abandoned and the decline in popularity of horse-racing being on the ‘blame’ list. A repeat with Hills would make a very nice shorting opportunity.

Mind you a 10% fall seems quite modest compared to the 20% drop seen by Marks and Sparks shares yesterday (Tuesday), reflecting the current doom and gloom attitude towards high street retailers.

M&S’ like for like sales fell 2.2% but it might have been Chief Exec’s Stuart Rose’s comments that pushed shares in the sector down most. Let me give you a flavour:
“Very evident slowdown in UK plc … market conditions became more challenging … trading conditions to remain tough throughout 2008 … battening down the hatches”.

What’s more a survey by the British Retail Consortium on Monday suggested the sector has done worse than expected, with sales from existing stores growing no more than 0.3%.

Of course this bad news should be fully reflected in share prices by now, and there are always exceptions. Waitrose, for example, has reported sales growth of 4% over Christmas. Could Sainsbury, whose results are due out tomorrow (Thursday), prove another?