The battle between London's bulls and bears intensified yesterday, with the former gaining the upper hand during the early part of the day only to see their best efforts erased as the session wore on.

During the last few minutes of the trading day the market picked up again and the Footsie finished with a modest gain. Expectations that Wall Street's reasonably strong showing on Friday evening might have been sufficient to drive the FTSE 100 back through the elusive 6,000 level were dashed when London's benchmark index faltered.

Wall Street gave confusing signals at the outset of US trading yesterday, when the Dow Jones fell away sharply only to rally as London's close loomed. The Nasdaq, on the other hand, was in fine form and up 60 points at the same time. The more junior indices were never really pressured on the downside, with the FTSE 250 always looking comfortable and in positive territory and finally 22.5 ahead at 6,605.2. The FTSE SmallCap was 5.7 up at 3,123.9 and the Techmark 100 30.23 better at 2,088.29.

There was plenty of news to get the market excited. The provisional revisions of the MSCI index constituents, after the introduction of free-float weightings for all current and new MSCI constituents, announced on Saturday, triggered plenty of comment and some market activity.

The changes should bring the biggest benefits, in the form of investment inflows to UK stocks, to Shell, BP Amoco, Vodafone and GlaxoSmithKline, according to Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.

On a country basis, Credit Suisse First Boston said the biggest winners in the MSCI World were the US and the UK. There were mixed performances from the most affected UK stocks yesterday, with the oil majors making early progress but GlaxoSmithKline and Vodafone struggling throughout.

Another of the market's superstocks attracting high levels of activity was BT, whose shares traded for the first time, "ex" the 5.9 billion rights issue. They were under pressure throughout the day as the market continued to fret about the numbers of private investors who would either sell their rights in the market or let them lapse.

Turnover in equities reached 1.54 billion shares.