Market report
CUSTOS The market's nerve has again been tested, and has again held. Last Friday the slow decline in the Financial Times index suddenly gathered pace : the index dropped ten points in the first two hours' trading, with jobbers lowering and widening their quotations: it looked for a little while like a major collapse. But buyers began to nibble as the day went on, and this week they have returned in more force, push- ing the index from Friday's 477 to over 490. Good company news—notably from Marks and Spencer—helped: but this level of the market is meant to discount good company news. On the takeover scene, Petgamon, for whom the market predicted a link with British Printing, has instead bid for News of the World.
Some bargain-hunters have appeared among the Australian stocks, which have shown such steep falls from their heady prices of the spring: Great Boulder at 92s 6d/97s 6d, having louched 186s, and Hampton Areas back to 42s 6d from 130s. The rule here should be to stick to the blue chips, and buy per- formance rather than hope. North Broken Hill (63s; year's high point, 93s 9d) has come back as far as many stocks whose present yield is nil and whose future is a gamble. Not that `gamble' need be a term of abuse; but the odds should be right.
Thomas Tilling has come up with a strong interim statement: in the first half of the year group sales rose from 15 per cent and pre- tax profit by 20 per cent. The boom in car sales before the budget helped the vehicle dis- tribution side. Central and District Properties has raised the final dividend from 5 to 5.35 per cent—the maximum increase permitted— on a pre-tax profit £143,042 lower at f976,10I : interest charges on long-term borrowings have risen by almost half a million pounds.