London pre-open: All eyes trained on April US jobs report

Stocks in London are being called to start the day with slight losses as investors waited on this afternoon's US jobs report.

The US jobs market is thought to be in good shape but the weaker-than-expected results of a private sector survey on hiring conditions released on 4 May had set some tongues wagging about a possible weakening of the labour market, especially given the sharp drop expected in US corporate profits over the first three months of the year.

On the previous Wednesday, private consultancy ADP said its measure of private sector payrolls increased by 156,000 in April, comfortably below the 195,000 which analysts had been anticipating.

Against that backdrop, the Footsie is expected to start the session with a 12 point move lower from Thursday's closing mark of 6,117.25.

Validating some traders' caution, US corporates announced 65,141 job-cuts in the month of April, 35% more than in the previous month, according to a report on Thursday from Challenger, Gray&Christmas.

Redundancy announcements were highest in the energy patch and in computers, precisely two of the sectors forecast to see the sharpest drops in profits during the first quarter of 2016.

Nevertheless, “it is not unusual to see heavy job cuts a strong economy. In December 1998, near the height of the dot.com boom, we recorded more than 103,000 planned workforce reductions. The fact is, companies are constantly retooling, and sometimes the best time to do that is when the economy is strong,” Challenger said.

Analysts at Pantheon Macroeconomics were of a similar view, telling clients that: "April payrolls likely were solid, despite soft ADP and ISM non-manufacturing employment numbers…Look out too for a hefty increase in hourly earnings, after a run of calendar distortions. The downward trend in unemployment remains intact, but the rate of decline is slowing."

Fedspeak overnight was mixed, with the president of the Federal Reserve bank of Dallas reiterating his view that financial markets "well be underestimating how soon we might move next based on what I have seen".

In parallel, his counterpart at the Atlanta Fed told CNBC that: "I think we should keep the option open. But I am very much at the moment sort of on the fence and it will depend on how the data come in."

Easyjet passenger numbers jump in Q1

Passenger numbers grew at easyJet in April, by 6.1% to 6.37 million, the low-cost carrier reported on Friday morning.
Load factor was down 0.4 percentage points over April last year, however, to 90.4%. On a rolling 12 months basis, the FTSE 100 firm flew 71.13 million passengers - a 7.4% improvement on a year ago. Load factor was also up on a rolling 12 months to the end of April, by 0.5 percentage points to 91.5%.

First quarter revenue per available room at Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) rose 1.5% against a background of weak oil markets and earlier Easter which impacted hard in the Americas and Europe. IHG said it expected to reverse the Easter effect in the second quarter. Net system size was up 2.7% year on year to 742,000 rooms across 5,028 hotels.