(Reuters) – London stocks tumbled on Friday as investors assessed a fall in domestic retail sales in June, while a downtick in commodity prices further dampened sentiment.
The blue-chip FTSE 100 index was down 0.6%, set to end the week lower. The mid-cap FTSE 250 was off 0.6% by 0730 GMT.
Precious metal miners weighed heavily on the index, with a 2.5% decline. Fresnillo slipped 5.4% to the bottom of the FTSE 100, in sync with spot gold prices that declined more than 1%. [GOL/]
Industrial metal miners were down 1.9% after copper prices hit an over three-month low in the absence of Chinese stimulus measures. [MET/L]
Aerospace and defence stocks were the only outliers with a 0.2% 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 the country in its conflict with Russia.
Investors parsed through domestic retail sales data that showed a 1.2% drop in June against an estimated 0.4% fall, bringing bets of an August cut to 43%, up from roughly 39% on Thursday. [0#BOEWATCH]
The numbers follow recent data that indicated slowing wage growth in Britain and inflation at the Bank of England’s 2% target.
Personal goods and retail stocks fell 2.8% and 0.6%, respectively.
Next week, the focus will shift to corporate earnings in the United States and the UK. U.S. inflation numbers will be in the limelight as the last crucial dataset ahead of the Federal Reserve’s next rate cut decision.
In London, Hargreaves Lansdown slipped 1% despite a strong growth in new customers and a rise in net new business in the fourth quarter.
LSEG Group’s shares also trended marginally lower after its Workspace news and data platform suffered an outage on Friday that affected user access worldwide.
(Reporting by Purvi Agarwal in Bengaluru; Editing by Sohini Goswami)
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