Sector movers: Telcos save market from bigger declines

The fixed line communications sector saved the day and helped the market rebound in afternoon trading.

The FTSE 100 ended 0.11% or 7.2 points lower at 6,345.13, however the FTSE 250 was 0.39% or 66.69 points higher at 16,984.03. Earlier, the market’s big morning climb was halted after the Bank of England’s well-known hawk Ian McCafferty again called for an interest rate hike.

In a speech at Bloomberg’s headquarters in London, he said: “If we on the MPC are to achieve our ambition of raising rates only gradually, so as to minimise the disruption to households and businesses of a normalisation of policy after a long period in which interest rates have been at historic lows, we need to avoid getting behind the curve."

At 1648 BST, WTI and Brent Crude had started to rebound after slowly falling over the last 48 hours. The November contract for WTI Crude was up $0.22 to $46.11 a barrel, while Brent Crude’s December contract was up $0.06 to $48.67 a barrel.

At the end of the London Metal Exchange session, it was a mixed bag. Three month contracts for primary aluminium took the biggest hit (-0.7), while lead (-0.1) and zinc (-0.5) also fell. However three month contracts of copper (+0.3), nickel (+0.5) and tin (+0.5) all rose. Despite the varied results, the industrial metals sector took the biggest hit, led by a 1.3% drop in Ferrexpo shares.

The pharmaceuticals sector was also in the red, after Credit Suisse cut AstraZeneca to ‘underperform’ from ‘neutral’ and trimmed its price target to 4,000p from 4,320p. The bank said the downgrade reflected the weak overall score for the group in its 2016 PharmaValues Strategic analysis.

Low oil prices of the week to date have taken a toll on the oil services industries. Tullow Oil and Premier Oil were also big fallers on the FTSE 250.

However fixed line communications was the big sector winner of the year. BT led the charge as it revealed early trials had found its G.fast technology, which it can roll out more quickly than replacing its copper wire with fibre-optic cable, was capable of achieving speeds of more than 5 gigabits per second. "The results give BT confidence that G.fast is a future proof technology that can help the UK maintain its position as the leading digital economy in the G20," it said.