At the open: Oil and China bring FTSE 100 back to reality
Buyers turned to sellers overnight as the feel-good factor across London trading floors evaporated and left the FTSE 100 to shed 0.4 per cent at the open – down to 6,378 from yesterday’s five-month high of 6,405.
As trading books passed from London to New York, the States held on to gains – the Dow Jones crept up by 0.27 per cent to 18,053. But by the time ledgers reached Asia, it was one-way traffic.
The Shanghai Composite lost 2.3 per cent and Hong Kong’s Hang Seng dropped 1.82 per cent.
The sell-off begun as Kuwaiti oil workers announced they were ending their three-day strike which had slashed daily production of the black stuff by 60 per cent in the gulf nation. Brent crude is down nearly two per cent on the news at $43.22 a barrel, after ending yesterday in London above $44.
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The FTSE’s fall was fairly indiscriminate this morning – a welcome relief for the commodities giants that climbed impressively yesterday. The biggest loser was Hargreaves Lansdown, down 2.1 per cent to 1,346p.
Although markets across Europe also pared back, Alistair Winter, an analyst at Daniel Stewart said that London could miss out on any springtime stock market rally because of uncertainty in the run up to the EU referendum.
“As the fur starts to fly on Brexit, the pressure is beginning to tell on UK equities, which are starting to look the wallflowers as other markets join the dancing bulls,” he said.