Morning Market, 27th March 2008

The FTSE opened up this morning, and after an hour was up about 54 points at 5,714, whilst the FTSE 250 was up about 130 points at 9,886.

Over the pond last night the DJI closed down 109.74 points at 12,422.86, but this was up nearly 50 points from the low of the session.  The S&P500 was down 11.86 ponts on the day at 1,341.13 and the Nasdaq at 16.69 points at 2,324.36.

Over in the Far East today the Nikkei 225 closed down 102.5 points, whilst in Hong Kong the Hang Seng recently closed up 47.21 points at 22,664.22.

Oil prices were up in Far East trading today, with Light Sweet (May del) up about 40c at US£106 bbl, and Brent (May del) up about 35c at US$104.3 bbl.

Here in London it was the catering group Compass Group that was doing well, with a trading update that said things were better than expected, giving a 12p rise to 322p this morning.

Firstgroup, the bus and train operator, was up nearly 20p at 564p after a trading update that said it was also doing ok, and was in-line with expectations.

On to financials, the banks were doing ok this morning. Barclays was up 8p at 453p on a broker comment from Merrills that said the company was basically the best value for investment in the sector at the moment. It also added that it expected the BoE to take some action to help the UK money markets back to somwhere near the norm. Peer Standard Chartered was up 15p at 1,773.

Building materials group Wolseley was 18p up at 545p after a Goldman Sachs broker upgrade to ‘neutral’ from ’sell’.

Onto oil, where Cairn Energy was up 75p at 2,761 due to oil getting dearer again.  Peer Tullow Oil was up 10p at 667.

On the downside, Kingfisher was down 2p at 133p after saying it was halfing its divvy after a near 3% drop in pre-tax profit for the year. It added that the next interrim divvy would also be about 50% down too.  Year end 02Feb PBIT was £386m, which was down from £397m.