British Land announces £300m share buyback, European parcels keep Royal Mail steaming

London open

The FTSE 100 is expected to open 24 points lower on Tuesday, after closing up 0.35% at 7,404.13 on Wednesday.

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British Land on Tuesday announced a £300m buyback, saying opportunities investment in the company's shares at the prevailing discount “offers better value than further asset acquisitions”.

Continued strong sales from Royal Mail's European parcels operation in the first quarter offset a decline from its UK business, though for the full year management did not push the envelope and kept targets unchanged. But despite continued business uncertainty in the UK, the FTSE 100 group's letters division performed better than expected, helped by the snap election.

Information services company Experian saw total revenue growth of 5% at actual exchange rates in the first quarter, it reported on Tuesday, driven by 17% growth in Latin America, 8% in North America and 5% in the EMEA/Asia Pacific region. The FTSE 100 company did see a 13% decline in revenue for the UK and Ireland for the three months to 30 June, however. At constant currencies, revenue growth across the group was 6%, while organic revenue growth was reported at 4% for the period.

Newspaper round-up

Rising prices and weak wage growth are already hitting the economy as British households are forced to cut back spending, analysts at PwC have warned as they forecast economic growth will slow to 1.5% this year from 1.8% in 2016. Falls in the pound over the past year have pushed up the cost of imported goods such as food and petrol, while wages have failed to maintain pace – though steady falls in unemployment have helped to cushion the blow. - Telegraph

China’s central bank has revealed shocking figures on the scale of shadow banking operations in the country, admitting that off-balance sheet business is more than double previous estimates. Bank assets are approaching $38 trillion (£29 trillion). The explosive growth of hidden activities on the margins of the financial system has alarmed the People’s Bank (PBOC), and suggests that the two-year credit spree since the downturn in early 2015 is treacherously unstable. - Telegraph

Brexit will hurt the car and financial services industries and locations as diverse as London and the Isles of Scilly, in particular, according to the Office for National Statistics. The ONS has drawn up an analysis showing which parts of the country could be most affected “because they are home to a concentration of industry or industries which have most at stake when the terms surrounding access to the single market, the free movement of labour, levels of funding and existing EU regulations are discussed”. - The Times

Theresa May is expected to face an effort by some Tory MPs to oust her in the autumn, despite her attempt to regain authority over her cabinet by ordering them to stop leaking details of their infighting over Brexit. With a letter of no confidence already in circulation but only a small number of signatures so far, several MPs said on Monday that May was safe until summer – with colleagues desperate to get to the parliamentary recess and have a break. - Guardian

The City watchdog has begun an investigation into the fast-growing £600 billion investment platform industry amid concerns that investors may not be getting the best value for money and that big providers could be keeping out competition from cheaper rivals. The Financial Conduct Authority said that it would examine the business models of Hargreaves Lansdown, Cofunds and others as it looked at whether they were delivering on their promise to use their market power to give customers a better deal on access to investment products. - The Times

US close

US stocks ended little changed on Monday as investors digested a disappointing reading on manufacturing and looked ahead to a raft of quarterly updates scheduled for release later in the week.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average ended flat at 21,629.72, the S&P 500 was virtually unchanged at 2,459.14 and the Nasdaq closed flat at 6,314.43.

Quarterly updates from the largest US corporates were still high on investors' minds, with figures from Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, General Electric and Microsoft all due out later in the week.

Results from Netflix were due out after the close of trading on Monday.

Meanwhile, investors were digesting the latest round of data from China, which showed second-quarter gross domestic product grew 6.9% from a year earlier, unchanged from the first quarter and ahead of expectations for 6.8% growth.

On a quarterly basis, the economy grew 1.7% compared to 1.3% in the first quarter, as expected. Chinese retail sales, industrial production and fixed asset investment data for June were also encouraging.

It was a less cheery picture on the US data front, however, as the Federal Reserve Bank of New York's regional 'Empire State' manufacturing index fell back from a reading of 19.8 for June to 9.8 in July. Economists had been expecting a reading of 15.