Footsie rises despite sharp fall for Tesco

Perry Gourley

Tesco trailed the FTSE 100 after a set of results which came in under market expectations.

But the supermarket’s plunge did little to hold back London’s blue-chip index which finished the day higher. The FTSE 100 index ended 35.73 points up at 7,510.28.

Tesco, which is Britain’s biggest retailer, saw shares drop 20.2p to 215p as a 24.4 per cent surge in group-wide half-year earnings to £933 million missed market expectations. Russ Mould, AJ Bell investment director, said there was a risk that the company is “still too complex”.

“The Booker deal is clearly designed to drive both sales growth and margins across the group while the launch of the new Jack’s chain is designed to tackle the threat posed by the discounters head on,” he said.

“Yet both initiatives will keep management very busy at a time when competing in the UK grocery market with Morrison, Sainsbury and rival online offerings is a full-time job in itself.”

Elsewhere, shares in Aston Martin hit the skids on their first day of trading. The luxury carmaker, which priced its stock market flotation at £19 a share valuing the company at £4.33 billion, saw shares tumble by 90p, or 4.7 per cent, to 1,809p.

Lender Funding Circle, which also began its first official day of full trading yesterday, held steady after losing more than 20 per cent of its value in conditional trading the day earlier. Shares closed at 365p, just 1p lower than Tuesday’s close but well below the IPO price of 440p.

Meanwhile, the price of oil remained high, with a barrel of Brent crude trading at over $85.3.