Industrials and financials still fail to impress

With the Nasdaq up almost 3 per cent in the opening session, technology stocks continued their strong recovery in London, Frankfurt and New York. But on the home market it was another poor day with financials remaining weak and some selected industrials coming under selling pressure.

Fyffes' collapse from a €3.96 high continued with a steady dripfeed of stock coming onto the market, with brokers believing most of the stock that has come on the market in recent weeks has come from those British and American institutions who bought DCC's stake in Fyffes at an average of €3.65. Needless to say, these investors' experience of Fyffes has not enamoured them to the Irish market in general and there is little demand from overseas. Fyffes closed down one cent on €1.00

Independent is another which saw some large-volume selling and the share lost 15 cents to €3.25 in a Dublin volume of over 5 million shares and another 6.4 million traded in London. Independent is not much above its 2000 low of €3.13 and a long way off the high of €5.59.

Otherwise volumes were pretty low with only Bank of Ireland trading more than 1 million shares. Bank lost seven cents to €6.83, while AIB was seven cents lower on €9.40 in another poor day for financials.

Although Iona was hit by profit-taking, most technology stocks were well-bid and traded in size. In London, Parthus was up 11p to £2.35 sterling (€3.81) in volume of 3.5 million shares while Baltimore gained 35p to £6.94 sterling (€11.26) in volume of 2.9 million shares and is now a long way removed from the £3.15 low of only a few weeks ago.

It must be a source of some chagrin to Baltimore that at its current level it would have probably held its place in the FTSE 100 rather than being removed from the index last month.