Promising start damped down again by US results

A promising start to the session by London's equity market, spearheaded by the recently beleaguered TMT sectors, was knocked on the head around midday by yet more bad news from across the Atlantic.

Another warning of slowing revenue, this time from Texas Instruments, the biggest manufacturer of chips for mobile phones, saw sentiment in London reverse, and ensuing selling wiped out what remained of the morning's gains in the FTSE 100.

But although they gave up some of the earlier rises, many of the TMTs managed to cling on to decent gains, helping to keep the slide in the 100 index to reasonable proportions.

Vodafone shares rallied well, with dealers reporting renewed support for the stock, which has bounced from around the 180p level reached last week and which finished in good heart yesterday.

At the close, the FTSE 100 was down 27.0 at 5,916.7, having swung in a near 90-point arc during the day, which saw the index briefly regain the 6,000 level only to fall away again dragged down by renewed weakness in the banking sector, especially HSBC whose results were poorly received.

While the FTSE 100 was suffering, ironically mostly from losses in many of the old-economy sectors, the other main indices put on a solid show. The Techmark 100 index of technology stocks staged a sustained rally to bring a halt to six consecutive days of losses, eventually closing 47.09 higher at 2,342.75. During the losing sequence, which encompassed the big sell-off in the TMTs, the Techmark 100 had fallen 312.1 points, or 12 per cent.

It was the same story in the FTSE 250, which had fallen on each of the previous six trading days, recording a loss of 126.2, or 1.9 per cent. Yesterday the 250 index pushed up 15.0 to 6,640.6, lifted by a sprinkling of winners in the tech stocks mixed in with a number of old economy areas, such as Wilson Bowden, the housebuilder and Airtours, the travel group.

One of the reasons behind the FTSE 100's reasonably resilient performance was Wall Street's refusal to buckle under the strains imposed by the string of warnings from the TMT areas.

Turnover in equities was 1.58 billion shares, one of the quietest days since the autumn of 1999.