London pre-open: Stocks seen up ahead of BoE rate announcement

London stocks were expected to open higher on Thursday as investors looked to the Bank of England’s rate announcement.

The FTSE 100 was set to open 21 points higher than Wednesday’s close at 6,691.

The BoE rate announcement is at 1200 BST. Investors will also eye US initial jobless claims at 1330 BST.

The consensus view is that the BoE will announce a 25 basis points cut to take the headline Bank Rate down to 0.25% from 0.50%.

David Morrison, senior market strategist at SpreadCo, said this would leave the BoE with some ammunition for later on.

“There’s an outside chance that the MPC goes all-in and cuts to zero. Another scenario is that the Bank leaves rates unchanged giving the markets longer to price in Brexit uncertainties. This would make some sense as the Bank also publishes its quarterly inflation report next month,” he said.

“Overall, it feels as if a 25 bps cut is priced in. Anything more than this and sterling will come under further pressure while equities rally. If the Bank leaves rates unchanged then expect sterling to rally and equities to pull back initially at least.”

In corporate news, information services firm Experian issued a first quarter trading update on Thursday, with total revenue growth of 5% at constant exchange rates in the three months to 30 June and 1% at actual exchange rates.

Of that, North America contributed 5% of the total revenue growth at constant exchange rates, Latin America 8%, UK and Ireland 1% and EMEA Asia Pacific 9%.

Latin America and UK and Ireland both declined at actual exchange rates, however, by 6% and 5% respectively.

Opening 12 new UK stores and five in Germany, B&M European Value Retail drove strong first-quarter revenue and said it was "on course" to hit market forecasts.

Moneysupermarket.com said it expects solid half-year results, with revenues seen growing by 10% to £158 million.

The company said it is making some additional marketing investment and so adjusted operating profit is expected to grow by 6% to around £54m.