Authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority

More falls for Footsie as the bad news keeps coming in

The FTSE 100 index responded to another drop on wall Street with an early fall today, and this time it was the miners as well as the beaten down stocks that led the way down. Lonmin, Ferrexpro, Xstrata and Kazakhmys were all fallers, as was BHP Billiton despite it receiving partial US anti-trust clearance to go ahead with its bid for rival miner Rio Tinto.

On the upside, recent favourite of ours AMEC rose over 4% after it said it continued to make excellent progress as it raised its margin expectation to 6.5% for 2008. you cannot ignore stocks making new highs, and this still looks very strong.

One stock that has been very weak recently is WPP, and the shares drifted again today after its revised £1.078bn bid proposal for Taylor Nelson was rejected. The terms of the offer were 173p in cash and 0.1889 of a WPP share for each Taylor Nelson share, but the latter believes it again substantially undervalues the group, so we might have hot stalemate for now..

In the retail sector, there was a little brighter news as Game said it was performing slightly ahead of its expectations for H1 as the PC and video games market continued to grow strongly. It looks forward to H2 and, although the quality of release schedule is unprecedented, it remained confident about the key Christmas trading season, which is more than you can say for the rest of the sector, but this was not good enough for the market and the shares are down 5%, which looks harsh.


Head of Research at Blue Index, specialists in trading Contracts For Difference
03/07/2008

< back

Free weekly trading updates straight to your inbox

Your Full Name

Your Email Address

Read terms and condtions