It was always going to be a quiet session in London's equity market. The anti-capitalist day of action encouraged some people to take a day off and many European markets closed for May Day, choking off business that would normally come London's way.
However, the main reason behind a weak showing by all the main indices, bar the FTSE SmallCap, was a poor performance from Wall Street overnight. The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished the session a net 75 points lower, having been 95 points higher at the start of Monday's trading session. Wall Street gave no further trouble to London at yesterday's US opening, the Dow moving ahead again to post a 70-point gain as UK trading ceased.
There was also a worryingly weak UK survey of manufacturing for April which came in at 47.8 per cent, well below the consensus forecast of 49 per cent and was the lowest figure since February 1999.
Mr Mike Taylor of Merrill Lynch said: "The survey was weaker than expected and adds further to evidence that the weaker global economic outlook is affecting the manufacturing sector. Last week's CBI survey revealed weaker optimism about manufacturing prospects. Overall, it adds to expectations that UK interest rates will be cut from their current 5 per cent at next week's meeting of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee."
At the end of the session, the FTSE 100 index settled a net 38.9 off at 5,928.0, having been down 49.9 to 5,917.0 at its worst of the day. The decline brought a halt to three consecutive winning sessions for London's benchmark index.
While the 100 index had to endure some mild turbulence during the session, the rest of the market was mostly easier but never under any real downside pressure. The Techmark 100 lost 19.74 to 2,080.68.
It was a real mixture in the market yesterday, with "new-economy/old-economy" stocks featuring in both the winners and losers lists. BT was in the unfamiliar position of topping the FTSE 100 performance table, after the company confirmed it was in advanced talks with Vodafone over the sale of its stakes in Japan Telecom and its mobile subsidiary.
Turnover in the market eventually reached a disappointing 1.6 billion shares.
