The summer holiday season, with its slumbering markets and minimal turnover, was forgotten yesterday as the recent frenzy of buying interest in resurgent high-tech, media and telecom stocks (TMTs) continued unabated.
The London market's blue-chip index, the FTSE 100, raced to a three-figure gain and the FTSE 250 and SmallCap indices advanced to further record levels.
The real star of the index family was the Techmark 100, which posted its third successive three-figure rise and its sixth consecutive gain.
The remarkable transformation of sentiment in the TMT sector came after another power-packed display by US markets, both overnight, when the Nasdaq Composite shot up a further 79 points, and yesterday afternoon, when it rose a more sedate 16 points.
Those sparkling performances were in response to highly encouraging economic data in the US, where the August non-farm payroll report showed a decline of 105,000 jobs during the month plus a 0.3 per cent increase in average hourly earnings.
More to the point for London, next week's meeting of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee, scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday, is expected to see rates left on hold.
Market-makers, still shaken by the sudden burst of buying by the big international institutions from Tuesday onwards, were reluctant to admit to being caught out by the pace of the market upturn.
But the extent of the rises in all the indices was a clear demonstration of a stock shortage.
The FTSE 100 closed the day a net 122.3 up at 6,795.0, its best level this year, and is now only 155.6 away from its record intra-day high, 6,950.6, reached on the last trading day of 1999. Over the week, the index rose 231.3, or 3.5 per cent.
The FTSE 250, meanwhile, sprinted up a further 51.1 to a closing peak of 7,108.9, having hit a record intra-day level of 7,135.3 earlier in the afternoon. Over the week, the 250 climbed 186.2, or 2.7 per cent.
A 52.9 advance by the FTSE SmallCap took that index up to a record 3,610.8, for a week's rise of 3.4 per cent. The Techmark 100's 139.8 gain to 4,259.61 took its rise over the shortened trading week to a remarkable 14 per cent.
