SSE upgrades earnings expectations, Spirent profits to beat consensus

London open

The FTSE 100 is expected to open 50 points higher on Friday, having closed down 1.07% at 7,747.29 on Thursday.

Stocks to watch

Power generator SSE upgraded annual earnings expectations as higher gas prices and better storage offset lower-than-expected renewables output. The company on Friday lifted adjusted earnings per share to more than 150 pence from previous guidance of at least 120 pence.

Telecoms testing company Spirent Communications said it expected to deliver an adjusted operating profit slightly ahead of market consensus, with good earnings growth over 2021. Full year revenue grew by 5.5% to $607m as the company said it had coped with global economic challenges, supply chain constraints and increasing cost inflation.

4imprint said on Friday that pre-tax profit for 2022 is expected to be above the upper end of the range of analysts' forecasts, and not less than $100m following a particularly strong finish to the year. In a brief update, the company - a direct marketer of promotional products - said unaudited group revenue for the year to the end of December was around $1.14bn, up 45% on 2021.

Newspaper round-up

Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, the entrepreneur who reshaped the media landscape and led the charge into streaming, announced he is stepping down as co-chief executive of the company on Thursday. Hastings, 62, co-founded the company in 1997 when Netflix delivered its subscribers movies on DVDs sent in the mail, will become chairman. Greg Peters, the company’s chief product and chief operating officer, will join Ted Sarandos, chief content officer, as a co-chief executive. Sarandos was elevated to co-CEO in July 2020. – Guardian

The US should not be “playing games” with the debt ceiling, the JP Morgan chief executive, Jamie Dimon, warned warring US political factions on Thursday as a heated row over the federal borrowing limit reached a crisis point. “We should never question the creditworthiness of the US government. That is sacrosanct and it should never happen,” Dimon said on Thursday in an interview on CNBC. “This is not something we should be playing games with at all.” – Guardian

The Government must lower taxes and remove red tape if it wants to drive long-term growth and “reach the sunlit uplands”, Sir Martin Sorrell has said. Sir Martin, chief of advertising group S4 Capital, said Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had failed to set out a plan to grow the economy with policies that would encourage businesses like his to invest. – Telegraph

Home Reit, the embattled “landlord for the homeless”, has had to delay its annual results for the second time, with its auditor demanding even more time to go through its accounts. The company’s results for the year to the end of August were due to be published in late November. However, a few days earlier its business model and practices were attacked by a short-seller, plunging it into chaos. – The Times

The FTX boss, who was the liquidator to Enron, the fraudulent energy company, said he had set up a task force to explore restarting FTX.com, the company’s main international exchange, and was looking into whether reviving it would recover more value for customers than his team could get from simply liquidating assets or selling the platform, according to The Wall Street Journal. – The Times

US close

Wall Street stocks closed in the red again for the third session in a row on Thursday, as investors digested another batch of data and comments from a number of Federal Reserve bankers.

At the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 0.76% at 33,044.56, as the S&P 500 also lost 0.76% to 3,898.85, and the Nasdaq Composite was 0.96% weaker at 10,852.27.

The Dow closed 252.4 points lower on Thursday, extending the wide losses it recorded on Wednesday as market participants digested a slew of data points.

Economic data was again the flavour of the day on Thursday, with initial jobless claims figures falling by 15,000 week-on-week to 190,000, according to the Labor Department - the lowest in four months and well and truly below expectations for a print of 214,000.

On another note, housing starts fell by 1.4% month-on-month to reach an annualised pace of 1.38m, according to the Commerce Department.