By Purvi Agarwal and Roshan Abraham
(Reuters) – London stocks finished the week lower amid a global cyber outage on Friday as investors assessed a fall in domestic retail sales in June, while commodity-linked stocks dropped, tracking declines in prices of copper, gold and other metals.
The blue-chip FTSE 100 index was down 0.6%. The mid-cap FTSE 250 was off 0.8%. Both indexes snapped two weeks of consecutive gains.
LSEG Group, which runs the London Stock Exchange, said its Workspace news and data platform, regulatory news service and currency spot and forward prices had been affected by the outage caused by a “third-party global technical issue”.
By midday in London, most of those issues seemed to have been resolved. Securities trading on the London Stock Exchange was not affected.
Mining stocks weighed heavily on the blue-chip index as prices of precious and base metals fell on weaker China demand and expectations of a U.S. interest rate cut in September.
Precious metal miners fell 0.8%, with Fresnillo falling 1.4% in sync with a decline in spot gold prices. [GOL/]
Industrial metal miners were down 1.7% after copper prices hit a more than three-month low in the absence of Chinese stimulus measures. [MET/L]
Aerospace and defence stocks were the only outliers with a 0.7% gain amid the broader declines after senior executives from British defence firms, including BAE and Babcock, met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy to discuss the need to boost military support for his country in its conflict with Russia.
Investors parsed through domestic retail sales data that showed a bigger than expected 1.2% drop in June, following slower wage growth data and inflation at the Bank of England’s 2% target.
The retail data pushed up bets of an August cut to 43%, up from roughly 39% on Thursday. [0#BOEWATCH]
Personal goods and retail stocks fell 5.3% and 0.3% respectively.
In the week ahead, the focus will shift to corporate earnings in the United States and the UK, with all eyes on U.S. inflation numbers ahead of the Federal Reserve’s next monetary policy meeting.
Shares of non-life insurer Beazley Plc also fell 3.3% which RBC analysts cited to fears of losses arising from Microsoft cloud outage.
(Reporting by Purvi Agarwal and Roshan Abraham in Bengaluru; Editing by Sohini Goswami and Andrew Heavens)
