No escape from pressure during painful session

There was no respite for a weary looking London stock market yesterday. The FTSE 100 index once again lost its grip on the 6,200 level and all the main indices were under relentless pressure during a painful session.

The FTSE 100 ended a miserable day a net 52.3 lower at 6,176.2, having dipped to 6,131.6 at it worst of the session. The FTSE 250 lost 27.5 to 6,747.5, the FTSE SmallCap 27.2 to 3,279.7 and the Techmark 100 66.64 to 2,560.03.

It was almost entirely the TMT sectors, the techs/media/telecoms, which have caused investors such immense pleasure and equally such immense pain over the past 18 months or so, that drenched the trading screens in a sea of red.

But it was not only the TMTs that unnerved the market. Wall Street gave an unconvincing performance at the finish of trading. The reversal in sentiment on Wall Street came as Mr Alan Greenspan's testimony to the Senate Banking Committee was interpreted as indicating that US interest rates might not be cut as aggressively as markets had been hoping.

On the domestic economic front, it was another busy day, with the Bank of England's quarterly inflation report containing no real surprises for the market.

Of more concern to the market was the average earnings data for the quarter to December, which came in at 4.4 per cent, year-on-year, against a consensus forecast of 4.2 per cent.

And the unemployment figures showed a much higher than expected decline of 25,500, taking the claimant count down to just over one million, the lowest level since 1975.

The catalyst for the latest slide in telecoms was, once again, Orange, the mobile phones group whose flotation has turned into a disaster. The shares followed up their dismal market debut with another wholesale retreat yesterday, which saw the stock price down another 7.4 per cent.