Hot Features
Premium
Trade like a pro: Leverage real-time discussions and market-moving ideas to outperform.
London open: Stocks fall ahead of US non-farm payrolls report
London stocks slid on Friday with investors taking a cautious approach ahead of the US non-farm payrolls report later.
The non-farm payrolls report at 1330 BST is expected to show US employers added 200,000 jobs in April, compared to 215,000 in March. The unemployment rate is expected to remain at 5.0%.
Average hourly earnings are projected to rise 2.4% in April following a 2.3% gain the prior month.
The data from the Labour Department will be closely scrutinised by Federal Reserve policymakers as they take into consideration the health of the jobs market in determining the timing of the next interest rate hike.
“The bigger concern for the Fed right now is inflation, with wages not growing near as much as they would like to see,” said Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at Oanda.
“This could be a reflection of the low global inflation environment we find ourselves in as well as the quality of jobs being created but with the amount of slack now significant diminished, we should expect wage growth to start picking up.”
Meanwhile, oil prices reversed the previous day’s rally with Brent crude down 0.17% to $44.93 per barrel and West Texas Intermediate down 0.29% to $44.19 per barrel at 0858 BST.
In company news, shares in Easyjet descended after the airline said its load factor – the ratio of passenger-kilometres travelled to seat-kilometres available – was down 0.4 percentage points in April compared to last year to 90.4%.
Interserve was in the red after saying expectations for its UK construction division have taken a significant hit due to a further deterioration in its Glasgow energy from waste contract.
BBA Aviation slumped as it said trading was in line with its expectations from 1 January to the end of March with a decline in organic revenue.
Morgan Advanced Materials jumped after saying trading conditions in the first three months of the year are in line with management expectations.
