RAMSEY CROOKALL & CO MORNING REPORT 17th DECEMBER 2010

London has started slowly despite the late gains on Wall Street overnight with some gloomy comments from the Bank of England unsettling the mood.

The Bank warned of more bad debt provisions for the banks and also expressed serious concerns for the bond markets if yields continued to rise. Lloyds and Barclays lead the sector lower.

Property groups have burst into life, with good gains for Land Securities, British Land and Derwent London.

A surge in activity in the fourth quarter enabled temporary power and temperature control specialist Aggreko to nudge its full-year profit estimates higher. It now expects a pre-tax profit of around £305m for 2010, up from its estimate of £300m in October.

Elsewhere, Petrofac, the oilfield services provider, thinks net profit for 2010 will be up by a fifth, in line with expectations, while the year-end order backlog should be a new record. In a statement ahead of full-year results due on 7 March, the company said it should match the $416.3m profit forecast by analysts.

AstraZeneca has suffered another delay in getting US approval for its potential blockbuster blood-thinning drug Brilinta after the US Food and Drug Administration requested more information. The FSA issued AstraZeneca with a complete response letter requesting additional analysis of the data from a study of the effects of Brilinta (ticagrelor) on 18,600 patients in 43 countries compared with its main rival Plavix.

Bus and train operator National Express will complete its business recovery programme ahead of schedule and now expects full-year profit to beat expectations. Normalised profit before tax, which excludes one-off items, will be “a little above current market expectations and markedly stronger than was expected back in January 2010”.

THE FTSE 100 AT 9.20 IS UP 5 @ 5886 THE DOW JONES CLOSED UP 41 @ 11,499

THE NASDAQ COMP CLOSED UP 20 @ 2637

Exchange Rates

GBP – USD 1.56 GBP – EUR 1.17

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