LONDON: London’s FTSE 100 fell on Wednesday, as firmer Treasury yields weighed on several sectors, while food delivery company Deliveroo slumped 30% on its first day of trading.
The blue-chip FTSE 100 index slipped 0.3%, with Oil heavyweights BP and Royal Dutch Shell falling between 0.7% and 1.1%.
Bank stocks, including HSBC Holdings, Prudential Financial and Barclays, were also among the biggest laggards.
The FTSE 100 has rebounded more than 38% from a coronavirus-driven crash last year, but it has struggled to reach pre-pandemic highs on increasing worries about inflation and the economic impact of lockdowns.
The domestically focused mid-cap FTSE 250 index was up 0.1%, led by financial stocks.
Topps Tiles fell 1.4% after reporting lower half-year sales, but the tile retailer said it expects sales to rise “sharply” and margins to recover to normal levels as the current lockdown in the United Kingdom gradually eases by the middle of April.
Shares in Deliveroo plunged by as much as 30% in their trading debut on Wednesday, slicing more than 2 billion pounds off the company’s valuation in a blow to Britain’s ambitions to attract fast-growing tech companies to the London market.
The highly-anticipated listing, the biggest on the London market in a decade, had been hailed by finance minister Rishi Sunak as a “true British tech success story” that could clear the way for more initial public offerings (IPO) by technology companies.
But the debut had already been overshadowed as some of Britain’s biggest investment companies shunned the listing, citing concerns about gig-economy working conditions and the share structure.
“Rising yields clearly have been an enormous issue, not so much in the performance of the headline indices but certainly in the underlying sectors and stock performances within those indices,” said Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell.
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