An attempt by Barclays to draw a line under the worries about its exposure to the global credit squeeze seems to have had little success.
An early 6% rise soon petered out as investors studied the detail of what was a fairly complicated statement about its Barclays Capital business. By the close the bank was down 2.5p at 530.5p.
Ryan Kneale, market analyst at financial bookmakers BetsFortraders.com, said: "Our clients have been predominantly short banking stocks since the credit crunch began and they show little sign of changing this stance at present, which leads me to believe there may be more bad news to follow."
At the moment, the market is awash with rumours and mortgage bank HBOS found itself on the receiving end of one of them. It was said to be making negative noises to the City about its finances and its shares fell 25.5p to 783p. In fact, it did give a sales presentation last night at Citigroup but just repeated that raising money in the wholesale markets at the moment was - self evidently - difficult. Indeed today's three month libor figure - the level at which banks lend to each other - rose from 6.3% to 6.3425%, a one and a half month high.
Yesterday, of course, Alliance & Leicester was forced to deny talk of a black hole in its accounts. It continued to buy back its own shares but this did not save it: the shares ended 21p lower at 648p.
As one trader said: "The market clearly thinks there are more credit problems out there, it just doesn't know who it is."
With credit information group Experian down 9.5% after it warned of a slowdown, the FTSE 100 was not in particularly good shape. It ended 72.5 points lower at 6359.6.
Among the smaller fry, health and social care group Care UK was hit hard after it revealed the cancellation of a diagnostics contract in the West Midlands. Its shares slumped 25% to 361p. But market makers said the fall looked overdone and there could be a bounce when the company outlines its results on Monday.
