News

Banks are at both ends of the Footsie leaderboard, with HBOS leading the risers and Royal Bank of Scotland the laggards. Resource stocks are also wanted, helping the Footsie into positive territory, despite expectations of a modest amount of profit taking on Wall Street after yesterday's strong rally.

Prudential said its capital position remains robust as it reported a 15% rise in sales in the nine month ended 30 September to £2,302m, but added that it is unlikely to achieve its goal of doubling 2005 Asian new business profit a year early in 2008.

Standard Life is marked down on reports that it is considering increasing its already substantial investments in bail-out banks HBOS and Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS). Elsewhere in the banking sector Standard Chartered and HSBC are put on the back foot by Prudential's caution on the growth rates of Asian markets.

Tullow Oil is higher on a combination of aggressive talk from OPEC and a new discovery in Uganda. Tullow Oil and partner Heritage Oil described the find as an 'exciting' start to their campaign at the project.

Broker KBC Peel Hunt says: "The current drilling campaign in Uganda has the potential to take the total discovered resources up to the threshold at which a long distance pipeline to the East African coast becomes viable - around 400 million barrels of oil."

The broker values Tullow's core net asset value per share at 414p, with a price target of 727p.

Wood Group, Petrofac and BG are also in demand on a good day so far for oil-related groups, with the latter benefiting from an "out-perform" rating by house broker Cazenove.

Diversified miner Xstrata lifted production across its commodity portfolio in the third quarter, but suffered the effects of lower prices for some of the raw materials it produces. It ramped up output of ferrochrome, thermal coal, platinum, mined nickel, zinc in concentrate and lead compared with the same period a year ago, helped by improved efficiency at its operations. Broker Evolution, which has a price target of 1050p for Xstrata, was encouraged enough to upgrade its stance on the shares from "sell" to "reduce".

Department store Debenhams kicked off a busy week for results from retailers with better than feared figures. Profits in the year to August fell to £105.9m from £113.2m on sales of £1.84bn up from £1.77bn. Like-for-like sales fell by 0.9%. US broker Merrill Lynch, which has an under-perform rating on the shares, said it would not be changing its 08/09 estimates as a result of today's announcements, which it said was a positive development, "given the recent raft of negative news flow in the sector."

Filters group Filtrona has slumped on a warning the ongoing strike at Boeing and weak trading elsewhere will mean profits this year coming in at the lower end of its forecasts."Current business trends, combined with the ongoing impact of the Boeing strike, indicate that Filtrona's performance in 2008 is likely to be at the lower end of the board's previous expectations," it said.

Electronics and technology firm Laird is higher despite saying organic revenue growth is unlikely to meet the medium term growth expectations while current conditions persist.

Salamander Energy has withdrawn its £124m offer for Serica in light of the continued uncertainty in the capital markets and volatility in the price of oil. Serica Energy last month rejected an all-share bid approach from Salamander Energy worth around 70p a share.

Oil and gas groups EnCore Oil, Faroe Petroleum and Stratic Energy said testing was completed on the East Breagh well 42/13-4, producing 10.2m standard cubic feet of gas per day. According to stockbroker Teathers, de-risking Breagh would add more than 50p to Faroe's core net asset value of 70p per share. Teathers has a price target of 190p on Faroe.

FTSE 100 - Risers
HBOS (HBOS) 90.80p +15.08%
John Wood Group (WG.) 249.50p +10.03%
Wolseley (WOS) 329.25p +9.84%
Xstrata (XTA) 1,137.00p +9.64%
3i Group (III) 490.50p +8.88%
Aviva (AV.) 333.50p +8.81%
Petrofac Ltd (PFC) 462.25p +7.94%
Tullow Oil (TLW) 534.50p +7.17%
Legal & General Group (LGEN) 70.70p +7.12%
British Airways (BAY) 145.10p +6.93%

FTSE 100 - Fallers
Royal Bank of Scotland Group (RBS) 80.00p -5.33%
Autonomy Corporation (AU.) 978.00p -3.65%
Standard Life (SL.) 226.75p -3.51%
HSBC Holdings (HSBA) 813.00p -3.21%
Standard Chartered (STAN) 1,096.00p -3.01%
Unilever (ULVR) 1,440.00p -2.51%
British American Tobacco (BATS) 1,678.00p -2.10%
Vodafone Group (VOD) 115.30p -1.87%
Friends Provident (FP.) 73.70p -1.73%
BT Group (BT.A) 140.30p -1.68%