Sector movers: Housebuilders recover, gold miners plummet

Gold miners tumbled while housebuilders recovered on Tuesday, over a largely positive trading session in London.

The FTSE 100 ended 1.68% or 96.88 points higher at 5,876.80, while the FTSE 250 was up by 0.98% or 155.75 points at 16,114.56. Oil futures remained at historic lows, with US benchmark WTI losing its premium to Brent, as an International Energy Agency report noted that prospects for the market balancing out in 2016 appear to be grim.

In its latest assessment of the market, the IEA said global demand growth could be in the region of 1.2m barrels per day in 2016; which was close to OPEC’s view of 1.26m bpd, and US Energy Information Administration’s prediction of 1.4 mn bpd.

At 1629 GMT, the Brent front-month futures contract was up 2.87% or 82 cents to $29.37 per barrel, while WTI fell 1.12% or 33 cents to $29.09 per barrel, shedding its premium to the global proxy benchmark after overnight gains.

In the precious metals market, COMEX gold futures contract posted a dip of 0.48% or $5.20 to $1,085.50 an ounce, while spot gold was 0.25% or $2.73 lower at $1,086.95 an ounce.

Elsewhere, base metals were also on a mixed footing on the London Metal Exchange. The three-month delivery futures contracts of copper (up 0.8%), lead (up 1.5%), zinc (up 1.5%) and nickel (up 0.3%) were trading higher, with tin (down 0.3%) and primary aluminium (broadly flat) heading in the opposite direction.

Miners responded in kind with Glencore (up 5.10%) finding its place among the FTSE 100 risers, with Evraz (up 5.81%) and Vedanta Resources (up 4.18%) doing likewise on the FTSE 250 ladder. However, gold miners went into reverse gear, with Randgold Resources (down 2.38%) and Fresnillo (down 1.48%) among the biggest blue chip fallers.

Housebuilders appeared to recover from a report by Rightmove published overnight which showed asking house prices increased just 0.5% between December 2015 and January 2016. Persimmon (up 3.87%) and Berkeley Group (up 4.14%) were among those to bag sizeable gains.

Elsewhere, AstraZeneca gained after Barclays upgraded the stock to ‘equalweight’ from ‘underweight’ and lifted the target price to 5,000p from 4,400p following a review of the pipeline and the recent Acerta Pharma and ZS Pharma deals.

Ocado jumped as rumours of a bid from Amazon resurfaced was in negative territory, bouncing back down following Monday’s confirmation it agreed to sell its Homebase division to Australia's Wesfarmers.

Finally, BAE Systems slumped after Credit Suisse downgraded the stock to ’underperform’ from ‘neutral’, saying it was not the bank’s preferred defence name, particularly after its recent strong run.