Just Group underlying profits rise, Telecom Plus reports strong trading

London open

The FTSE 100 is expected to open six points higher on Tuesday, having closed up 0.52% on Monday at 8,210.25.

Stocks to watch

Just Group reported a 44% increase in underlying operating profit to £249m for the first half on Tuesday, driven by strong growth in new business sales and higher recurring in-force profit. The FTSE 250 company said retirement income sales grew 30% to £2.5bn, with a corresponding 38% increase in new business profits to £222m. It said it maintained a robust capital coverage ratio of 196%, and announced a 20% increase in the interim dividend to 0.7p per share.

Telecom Plus reported continued strong trading performance in an update on Tuesday, saying that its multiservice customer proposition was enabling it to outperform competitors in a normalised market. The FTSE 250 company, which was holding its annual general meeting, said it was on track to double its customer base to two million over the medium term while also increasing profits and shareholder returns. It also reaffirmed the positive outlook it provided with its annual results in June.

Newspaper round-up

The Treasury has sought to defuse a bitter row with the North Sea oil and gas industry by promising to keep investment reliefs on low-carbon projects, aiming to protect jobs and soften the expansion of the energy windfall tax. The chancellor, Rachel Reeves, said last month that she would expand the levy on energy industry profits as part of her plan to plug a £22bn “hole” in the public finances that Labour said had been left by the previous Conservative government. – Guardian

The UK’s biggest housing association has been fined after a watchdog found that its failure to carry out repairs to a child’s bedroom window for four years left the home mouldy and caused serious illness in the family that lived there. Clarion housing association showed “no urgency” to fix the window, instead leaving it boarded up, despite repeated complaints from the tenant who said the mould caused his asthma to flare up and affected his son’s mental health. – Guardian

Boris Johnson has held talks about a role at The Telegraph as part of former Tory chancellor Nadhim Zahawi’s takeover bid. The former prime minister had informal discussions with Mr Zahawi, who is assembling a consortium to buy The Telegraph as part of an auction process, about a possible job if he is successful. – Telegraph

Offices in the UK are selling for almost a fifth less than what their owners were hoping they would fetch, the biggest discount since the global financial crisis 15 years ago. In a sign of how tepid demand is, especially for older and less eco-friendly blocks, buyers of offices this year have on average paid 18 per cent less than the asking price, data from CoStar, the property analytics group, shows. – The Times

Investors pulled a record amount of cash out of China in the second quarter of this year amid concerns about the health of the world’s second-largest economy, official data showed. In the three months to June, outflows of investor capital from China reached $15 billion, according to balance of payments figures published by the State Administration of Foreign Exchange last Friday. The numbers were first reported by Bloomberg. – The Times

US close

Wall Street delivered a mixed performance on Monday as market participants looked ahead to key inflation data due out later in the week.

At the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 0.36% at 39,357.01, while the S&P 500 was flat at 5,344.39 and the Nasdaq Composite saw out the session 0.21% firmer at 16,780.61.

The Dow closed 140.53 points lower on Monday after stocks almost completely reversed their violent sell-off from the start of last week.

This week's primary focus will be the July producer price index on Tuesday and the July consumer price index on Wednesday, which may shed some light on whether or not markets have priced in the likelihood of a 50 basis point reduction in the Federal Reserve rate at its next policy meeting in September.

In the corporate space, KeyCorp surged after Bank of Nova Scotia agreed to invest $2.8bn in the lender, while Starbucks also traded higher following a Wall Street Journal report that revealed activist investor Starboard Value has now taken a stake in the coffee chain.