Market recovers following Wednesday's heavy selling

With Wall Street failing to react to figures showing very strong US economic growth in the first quarter - up 4.8 per cent against consensus forecasts of 4.2 per cent - the Dublin market recovered from its 2 per cent losses on Wednesday to close ahead on the day.

Given that they took the brunt of the Wednesday selling, it was no surprise that the main financial shares notched up the best gains. The heaviest trading was in AIB which closed up 30p on 915p, its highest level during the day's trading. Bank of Ireland was 41p higher on £13.06 while among the smaller financials, Anglo Irish recovered 6p to 191p, Irish Life was 7p higher on 572p while Irish Permanent closed up 15p on 880p.

The marginal rise in the ISEQ does not really reflect the pattern of trading as it was mainly accounted for by a 294p fall in Elan shares to £43.42. Elan trades infrequently in Dublin, and when it does it usually rises and falls by large amounts, catching up on movements on its prime market on Nasdaq. Accounting for 10 per cent of the ISEQ, these price movements have a distorting effect on the daily ISEQ movement. In contrast, Elan shares on Nasdaq were only marginally lower on $61 1/2 as the Irish market closed.

A 9p fall by £10.21 by CRH was the other factor which curbed the rise in the ISEQ, but Smurfit recovered from its heavy fall on Wednesday, closing up 4p on 234p although this is still well below its level immediately before the announcement of the JS Corp/Stone merger. JS Corp and Stone were both weaker on Wall Street, broadly in line with the overall weakness in the packaging sector.

Some second-liners which did not trade during Wednesday's £1 billion sell-off on the market fell sharply yesterday. DCC was the worst-hit, falling 55p to 635p as a line of stock went through the market. Given the recent full-year results and the earnings upgrades, this fall in the DCC price seem overdone. Avonmore Waterford was 10 lower on 310p while Golden Vale dropped 5p to 111p, a level that also seems oversold given the scale of Golden Vale's recovery. Grafton was 50p lower on £18.50 while in the same sector of the market Heiton dropped 20p to 230p.

Independent - which refinanced £75 million of debt with a preference share issue - was 10p higher on 440p although Kingspan lost 10p to 325p despite more bullish comments from analysts. NCB has slapped a "buy" tag on Kingspan and is looking for pretax profits of £38.1 million and earnings per share of 17p in the current year. Ryanair saw its share price dip 18p to 502p, which was probably caused by a small bout of profit-taking by some investors who feel the stock is levelling off slightly.

Minmet did not trade from its overnight 9p after disclosing that it intends to bid for the outstanding share in subsidiary Connary Minerals.

The seemingly bottomless hole that is Powerscreen was reflected once again in another disastrous day for the shares, down 13p to 97p sterling with absolutely no confidence in the market.