RAMSEY CROOKALL & CO May 23rd 2012

Morning  Report

The FTSE 100 trades down, following weak sessions in Asia and the US, as the tone turned sour ahead of Wednesday's EU summit. On the corporate front: Barclays slipped following its BlackRock stake pricing, while Burberry is knocked lower after a disappointing FY trading update. Elsewhere, the London Stock Exchange slumped 7.4% after Italian banks sold stakes in the business.

Iconic British luxury brand Burberry dropped early on despite reported solid profit growth in the year ended March 31st. Adjusted profit before tax increased by 26% from £298m to £376m, slightly ahead of consensus forecasts of £374.7m. One issue that may be weighing on the shares this morning was the guidance for unchanged licensing revenues this year, and lower operating margins in the first half.

Miners were also unwanted in the opening hour on the back of risk aversion. Vedanta Resources, Rio Tinto, Glencore, Xstrata, Kazakhmys, BHP Billiton, Fresnillo and ENRC were registering losses.

UK banking titan Barclays was out of favour after it announced the pricing details of the open offer part of its recently announced sale of its stake in US wealth management giant Blackrock. Barclays has agreed to sell 26.2m shares of Blackrock in an underwritten public offering at a price of $160 a share.

International engineering company AMEC announced it was in discussions to buy Serco's nuclear Technical Consulting Services (TCS) business. Both stocks were firmly lower.

British Sky Broadcasting (BSkyB) was one of the few risers after the Competition Commission announced that it was no longer concerned that 'Sky Movies' has an unfair advantage over its competitors.

THE FTSE 100             @ 10:00       Down    89       @      5,314 THE DOW JONES            closed        Down    1        @     12502 THE NASDAQ               closed        Down    8       @      2839 Exchange Rates

GBP – USD       @      10:00             1.5706 GBP - EURO     @      10:00             1.2421

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