Tesco profits up 30%, WH Smith's up 4%

London open

The FTSE 100 is predicted to be largely flat on Wednesday.

Stocks to watch

Tesco reported a 29.9% rise in group full year operating profits to £1.28bn on the back of a 4.3% increase in group sales to £49.9bn. The figures exclude an exceptional charge of £235m, including a deferred prosecution agreement between Tesco and the UK Serious Fraud Office over historic accounting practices and an agreement with the UK Financial Conduct Authority of a finding of market abuse in August 2014. The company said it intended to resume dividend payments in 2017/18.

Retailer WH Smith grew profits 4% in the first half of the year as sales from its travel arm more than offset continued decline of the high street business. Group revenues rose 2% to £643m but were flat on a like-for-like basis as travel LFL sales rose 5% and high street LFL sales fell 3%.

Engineer Keller Group has bought US infrastructure monitoring company GEO-Instruments, for an undisclosed sum. Rhode Island-based GEO-Instruments supplies and manufacturers monitoring systems for buildings, excavations, bridges, railways, roads, tunnels, dams, embankments, and slopes.

Newspaper round-up

Donald Trump’s plan to encourage US companies to repatriate profits held offshore will allow the 50 biggest American corporations to save at least $300bn (£240bn), according to research by Oxfam. The US president has promised that he will get America’s biggest companies to bring their vast offshore cash piles back to US soil by offering a one-off tax holiday. The plan is to tax repatriated money at 10% rather than at the statutory rate of 35%. – Guardian

More than two million savers are set to join a rush to grab a market-beating interest rate of 2.2 per cent after the government’s National Savings & Investment department yesterday released a savings bond with a guaranteed return that will beat what most banks and building societies offer. The Treasury expects to raise £7 billion from the bond offer, the first of its kind for more than two years. – The Times

American prosecutors have joined the widening inquiry into an attempt by the boss of Barclays to unmask a whistleblower who raised concerns over the bank’s recruitment of one of his former colleagues. The US Department of Justice is the latest agency to investigate Barclays and Jes Staley, its chief executive, as it examines whether he and other senior directors of the bank broke rules put in place to protect whistleblowers. – The Times

US close

Stocks on Wall Street slipped slightly as geopolitical concerns weighed on investor sentiment on Tuesday, sending investors towards the relative safety of US Treasuries and gold.

The Dow Jones Industrials index ended 0.03% or 6.72 points lower at 20,651.30, while the S&P 500 lost 3.38 points or 0.14% to 2,353.78 and the Nasdaq Composite drifted down 14.15 points to 5,866.77.

In parallel, the yield on the benchmark 10-year US Treasury note ended the day down by seven basis points to 2.30%, albeit amid holiday-thinned trading volumes, as front month gold futures jumped 1.6% to close at $1,274.20/oz..

From a sector standpoint the worst performing industrial groups were: transport services (-1.78%), coal (-1.75%) and marine transportation (-1.40%).