Tim Martin, the founder of the pub chain JD Wetherspoon, is not everybody's tankard of ale. The mullet-haired publican has a knack of winding certain people up – so you're unlikely to be an admirer if you've ever been a fan of the euro, private equity funds or paying more than £5 for a haircut.
However, there are plenty who reckon that Martin is – in City terms, at least – box office. Among them is the Good Pub Guide, which last week named him as one of its "pub superheroes" (a superbeero, presumably), mischievously placing him alongside the likes of Greene King boss Rooney Anand, with whom Martin is, ahem, not close.
All of which is far more interesting than the company's results, which are out this week and routinely show the business performing nicely and as expected. More entertainment is usually gleaned from whatever righteous cause the superbeero is fighting on our behalf – with the current one being the battle to prevent continued pub closures by getting hostelries VAT parity with supermarkets on booze and food.
So on Friday he'll ease the Y-fronts over the slacks to plug "Tax Equality Day" – an event he's pledged to make "bigger than St Patrick's Day" (pull the other one) and "bigger than St George's Day" (it may be already). Superbeero might need another cause to fight.
Ashley's comedy routine
Like the Morecambe and Wise Christmas special, Mike Ashley is putting an awful amount of pressure on himself to deliver each year.
He and the retailer he founded, Sports Direct, have been serving up comedy classic after classic of late, whether that be: Ashley's perplexing personal investments (all the right share purchases, just not necessarily in the right order); Sports Direct's attachment to zero hours contracts (hello, folks, and what about the workers?); or chairman Keith Hellawell's numerous hilarious efforts to sneak Ashley-serving remuneration schemes past shareholders (you said that without moving your lips!).
So it is with huge expectation that retail watchers will ease into their sofas on Wednesday to tune into the group's trading statement and annual meeting, although they will do so with that nagging fear that sooner or later Ashley might not be funny any more.
The company will talk about how summer trading has gone – great weather, but set against England's premature exit from the World Cup – and the City is hoping it will be smiling at around 10% growth in gross profits. Rubbish, it almost certainly is not.
Dalton the prophet?
It is doubtful that anybody has ever accused Morrisons boss Dalton Philips of being a visionary – in fact, his sluggish adoption of internet shopping always gave the impression he wanted to be known as a bit of a straggler. But one of the many improbable achievements of his erstwhile rival, former Tesco boss Philip Clarke, is that is conceivably how the Irishman might end up being portrayed.
To explain: as Clarke lurched from crisis to crisis at Tesco, he resisted calls to introduce heavy discounts on the supermarket's products, meaning that when the pruning came, it was him that got snipped.
Yet in the spring, when Philips was really struggling, he unveiled price cuts on 1,200 items at a cost of £1bn – and warned that Morrisons' profits would halve as a result. The shares dived, of course, but at the end of last month data from the main industry barometer, Kantar, suggested that the discounts may be showing early signs of working.
We shouldn't get too excited just yet, as Morrisons' results this week will be dreadful, while we don't know how long it can try to buy market share.
Still, in other cheery news, investors might hang on to their dividend – which had previously looked about as precariously placed as a supermarket boss.
