Despite a deathly dull afternoon the Dow Jones rose another 30 to 50 points as it continues to be completely nonplussed by Wednesday’s impending rate hike from the Fed. That means the Dow is now tickling 19800, leaving it just less than 3 weeks to make up the measly 200 points it needs to hit 20000.
The main news out of the US was the 4.4% decline felt by Lockheed Martin, the aerospace and defence firm falling afoul of one of Donald Trump’s market-moving tweets. The President elect criticised (as much as one can in 140 characters) the cost of the company’s F-35 programme, making Lockheed the latest example of Trump’s worrying power to drag individual stocks lower with one of his angry online dispatches.
With little new to go on the FTSE failed to dispel its start of the week funk this afternoon, falling half a percent as it continued to ignore the gains seen in its commodity sector. While the likes of BP, Shell and Antofagasta all posted healthy growth, heavy losses in its housing sector, a smattering of red for its banks and chunky declines for ITV, Capita and Sky all helped prevent the UK index from enjoying Brent Crude’s non-OPEC output cut-inspired highs. An added irritant was the performance of the pound, which took 0.7% off a surprisingly weak dollar and 0.2% off the euro, which had been posting a comeback earlier in the day.
