London shares managed to shake off the malaise surrounding the hi-tech sector today and had a positive start to the session. Despite a sharp fall on the US Nasdaq exchange overnight, and a hefty drop on Wall Street’s Dow Jones, the FTSE-100 Index rose 20 points to 6162.2 by 9am.
The welcome rise reversed yesterday’s 22-point fall, led by bad sentiment among tech stocks – although the London market had shown signs of recovery in the afternoon and closed far higher than its session lows.
Today, investors continued the more upbeat mood from late yesterday, and the volatile tech shares buoyed the market.
The three tech stocks which are tipped to fall from the FTSE in its next quarterly review – Baltimore, Bookham and Sema – all made gains.
Software group Baltimore was up 18p at 308p, telecoms equipment firm Bookham Technology rose 21p to 900p and computer services group Sema jumped 13p to 302p.
Among the telecoms stocks, Colt Telecom rose 53p to £12.63, Vodafone was 6p higher at 247p and Cable & Wireless jumped 25p to 897p.
Other tech risers included chip designer Arm, up 17p at 457p, internet service provider Freeserve 62p higher at 211p and handheld computer group Psion ahead 18p at 251p.
But pharmaceuticals stocks were having a bad day, with merging giants Glaxo Wellcome and SmithKline Beecham off 65p at £19.92 and 19p at 900p respectively. AstraZeneca fell 120p at £34.80 and Shire Pharmaceuticals dropped 16p at £10.95.
EGi News 01/12/00
