THERE was clear evidence of the hangover effect in London's stock market yesterday, with many dealers preferring to concentrate on the post match analysis of England's defeat of the Netherlands in the European football championship finals.
The market received little help from the day's economic news. Expectations of a big increase in high street sales during May, followed by the bullish report issued last week by the British Retail Consortium, were demolished by official figures published yesterday. They stated that sales during the month actually fell by 0.1 per cent, against a consensus forecast of a rise of 0.4 per cent.
The economic news was seen by some market observers as strengthening the hand of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr Kenneth Clarke, after he insisted on a quarter of a percentage point interest rate cut two weeks ago.
European markets paid scant attention to a good early showing by Wall Street, where the Dow Jones Industrial Average posted a near 40 points gain shortly after the start of trading.
A quiet trading session crawled to a close, with the FTSE 100 index ending another sport affected session a net 3.2 off at 3,753.2, bang in the middle of its recent 3,650-3,850 range.
The market's second line stocks, represented by the FTSE Mid 250 Index, performed marginally better than the leaders, with that index ending the day 0.4 higher at 4,455.1.
Commenting on the day's events, or rather the day's "non events", as one of the market's big traders put it, "with all the distractions of football, cricket and racing, we need a big shift in sentiment, which will have to be triggered by either shock economic news or a big political story". Tongue in cheek, he said the odds favoured a British political scandal as the best bet to produce a market slide.
Turnover in equities just penetrated the 700 million mark eventually reaching 703.7 million shares at the 6 p.m. count. It was boosted considerably by at least two programme trades, said to have been executed by UBS and BZW.
Activity was divided almost 50/50 between Footsie and nonFootsie stocks. The value of customer business in equities on Tuesday was £1.7 billion sterling, well down on Monday's £1.9 billion.
Equity strategists were not too disheartened by the retail sales news, pointing out that the slowdown could increase the likelihood of further interest rate cuts in Britain.
