(Reuters) -Britain’s FTSE 100 inched to a record closing high on Tuesday as gains in energy giant Shell overshadowed declines in heavyweight copper miners after U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff hikes sparked demand concerns.
The FTSE 100 edged up 0.1%, helped by a 2.4% gain in Shell shares, with Nigerian oil producers in talks with Shell, the world’s largest LNG trader, for securing up to 25% of service contracts for the Bonga North deepwater project.
The mid-cap FTSE 250 was down 0.3%.
Global miners such as Antofagasta, Glencore and Rio Tinto dropped between 1.2% and 2.7% as Trump imposed fresh tariffs on all steel and aluminium imports on Monday to a flat 25% “without exceptions or exemptions”. That stirred worries that new U.S. tariffs and a potential global trade war will curb economic growth and metals demand. [MET/L]
Heavyweight BP shares lost 0.6%, retreating a day after logging their biggest daily gain in two years. The oil major posted its lowest earnings in four years with CEO Murray Auchincloss pledging to fundamentally reset BP’s strategy.
Travel and leisure lost 2.5%, the worst laggards among sectors as airline stocks fell. TUI flagged a slowdown in bookings, sinking its shares by 10.2%. Wizz Air fell 1.2%, easyJet dropped 2.7% and British Airways-owner IAG was down 1.7%.
Among other stocks, Bellway lost 5.2% due to affordability concerns in the British housing market.
Bookmaker Entain lost 11.1%, the biggest loser on the FTSE 100, after the company announced CEO Gavin Isaacs would step down immediately after just five months in the role, with chair Stella David assuming the CEO role on an interim basis.
Bank of England policymaker Catherine Mann said on Tuesday that her unexpected vote for a half-percentage-point cut in interest rates last week did not mean she wanted a series of rate cuts, or that she would vote the same way again in March.
On the data front, markets were gearing up for a U.S. inflation report on Wednesday and British gross domestic product (GDP) figures on Thursday, which could affect expectations for the BoE’s rate path.
(Reporting by Pranav Kashyap and Sanchayaita Roy in Bangalore; editing by Shinjini Ganguli; editing by Mark Heinrich)
