RAMSEY CROOKALL & CO 30th  March 2012

Morning Report

The FTSE 100 is up 0.4% at 5764.55, maintaining gains. Miners and industrial stocks are ahead as traders look to pick up a few bargains after recent declines. Today’s meeting of euro zone finance ministers in Copenhagen will be of interest.

Miners were performing strongly in the opening hour with Kazakhmys, Vedanta Resources, Antofagasta, Rio Tinto, ENRC, Fresnillo and Xstrata in demand. Despite this morning's 1.3% rise for the mining sector as a whole, stocks are still down an average 8.9% over the last month. Rio Tinto announced this morning that it has joined the China Beijing Metals Exchange (CBMX), a new electronic trading platform providing additional iron ore trading channels in the Chinese market.

Engineering titan GKN was a high riser with Jefferies saying this morning that it believes Volvo Aero would be a "good fit with GKN Aerospace". "It appears the suggestion GKN might partly fund its acquisition with new equity has caused the market some anxiety. Should the big day arrive, the acquisition would probably stand on its merits, in our view," the broker said.

Real estate investment trust British Land rose after announcing that the Gibraltar Limited Partnership, in which it has a 41% stake, agreed a new five-year £150m loan facility.

Drugs giant AstraZeneca has had a bad run of late so news that a US District Court has ruled that the formulation patent protecting its SEROQUEL XR blockbuster drug is valid will be most welcome with shares up 0.6% early on.

Sweeteners giant Tate and Lyle fell despite saying that trading in the final quarter of its financial year has been in line with expectations, consolidating a good performance for the year.

THE FTSE 100 @ 10:00                 Up             20       @      5,762 THE DOW JONES closed                 Up             19       @    13145 THE NASDAQ @ closed                  Down           9        @    3095

Exchange Rates

GBP – USD       @      10:00                         1.5997 GBP - EURO     @      10:00                         1.1989

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