Just as this week achieved the appeal of a caravan holiday in Bangor the sun came out - in Finland of all places - and the stock market brightened.

Nokia, the telecoms leader, announced second-quarter earnings that came in above the range of analysts' forecasts and set off a chain reaction that ended with the FTSE 100 reversing earlier losses to end a net 32.8 higher.

However the turnaround was slow to arrive and it was not until Wall Street moved higher that London had the confidence to respond.

"The US took the numbers fairly positively. We could not make our own decision about one of Europe's most important companies. It just shows how rudderless we have become," said Mr Robert Buckland of Schroder Salomon Smith Barney.

The shattered nerves were very evident first thing. There was a £425 million bid for Tempus, the media group, and the banks reporting season got off to a reasonable start with some top of the range figures from Northern Rock.

However, the market preferred to take its cue from a profits warning by Misys, the software group, and the Footsie was off 82 by mid-morning.

Trading was described as very quiet and the cricket was rained off so dealers were concentrating on the Golf Open.

Even though most continental bourses reacted to the Nokia news first thing, London held back and by the early afternoon nine of the 10 biggest European fallers were UK companies.

Later, however, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and Nasdaq composite took a more enthusiastic view of the telecom group's figures as well as some slightly reassuring figures from Dell, PepsiCo, Sprint and Eli Lilly.

The Dow's early 100-point gain provided the necessary spark to push the broad indices better. The FTSE 250 rose 11.9 to 6,091 and the FTSE All Share 13.89 to 2628.57.

The SmallCap fell 2.8 to 2,772 and the Techmark 100 28.41 to 1,525.29.