After six days of falls, and despite an overnight drop of nearly 1.5% on the Nikkei, shares in London are making an attempt to recover.
Following the unrest in the middle east and Libya, and then of course the disaster in Japan, the FTSE 100 has fallen 8% from its recent peak of 6087 in February, putting it close to a technical correction (a 10% drop). Today however it currently is up 51.07 points at 5649.30 as investors dipped their toes back into the riskier end of the market on hopes the nuclear problems in Japan could be resolved. Joshua Raymond, market strategist at City Index, said:
European indices bounced back from heavy weakness over the last week of trading as bargain hunters attempted to pick up some of the more badly beaten shares. However, traders remained extremely cautious and much of the buying activity we have seen has been to close stop losses indicating that investors may feel today's rally could be a short term move.
Insurers, hard hit recently on worries about their exposure to the Japanese crisis, have recovered a little, with Prudential up 22.5p at 696p. An exception was Legal and General, which ran into a little profit taking after its figures, falling 0.5p to 110.6p.
Mining companies, which have been among the biggest losers on fears the Japanese catastrophe would hit global economic growth, have also regained some ground. Rio Tinto has risen 85p to £39.59 while Kazakhmys has climbed 28p to £13.28.
Among the mid-caps, Heritage Oil added 17.8p to 307.5p on reports it had rejected an informal 425p a share offer from an unnamed Abu Dhabi company.
Insulation and roofing specialist SIG is up 7.4p to 128.5p after a 3% rise in full year profits to £62.5m and news it would start paying a dividend again in 2011.
