Black Monday anniversary it may have been, and Mr Gordon Brown may have made the markets tremble, but for all the shock horror stories of the weekend, dealing in Dublin and London yesterday was a bit of an anticlimax, with the FTSE down by just over 1 per cent and the Irish market down by less than 1 per cent.

Share prices drifted lower but with many fund managers away from their desks on a trip to the US, volumes were pretty thin and well down on recent daily volumes.

Indeed, the volumes for last Friday provided two of the talking points of the day, with official Stock Exchange figures showing an extraordinary £43.7 million worth of Hibernian shares and £17.5 million worth of James Crean being dealt and matched. Even allowing for double-counting of the buying and selling sides, this suggests that about 4.5 million shares or almost 8 per cent of the total Hibernian equity changed hands in just six bargains.

In Crean's case, the turnover figures suggest over six million shares or nearly 15 per cent of the equity changed hands.

This pattern of trading in companies whose shares do not normally trade very actively would indicate that some big shareholders took a decision to take (in the case of Hibernian) and cut losses (in the case of Crean). Hibernian was unchanged on 485p and Crean jumped 10p from its recent low to close on 130p.

Among the leaders, it was all red ink, with AIB down 5p on 590p and Bank of Ireland down 4p on 866p. CRH lost 5p to 820p while Smurfit was 2p lower on 221p. Among second-liners, Ryanair lost 8p to 382p, Jurys jumped 35p to 450p in thin trading for no immediate obviously reason while Navan lost 19p to 125p. Aminex was unchanged as the group disclosed that it placed 150,000 shares at 75p sterling each with Arosco Ltd, a Russian investor.