Reuters: Hot Stocks: Britain's FTSE falls for 3rd day, miners cap losses

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Britain's FTSE falls for 3rd day, miners cap losses Apr 16th 2013, 08:14 Tue Apr 16, 2013 4:14am EDT * FTSE 100 down 0.5 pct * Next key support seen at 6,214 -Charles Stanley * Miners track gold's recovery off lows By Toni Vorobyova LONDON, April 16 (Reuters) - Britain's FTSE 100 extended losses into a third session on Tuesday, but the weakness was capped by a tentative recovery in miners, which took heart from a modest rebound in metals prices. Gold and silver prices recovered after hitting their lowest levels in around 2 years overnight, tempting some investors back into the mining shares that suffered steep drops on Monday. Fresnillo gained 4.8 percent, while Eurasian and Randgold Resources each added around 4 percent. Miners - the biggest contributors to the FTSE's fall in the previous two sessions - added 8.3 points to the index in early trade on Tuesday. Broader appetite for risk assets, however, was subdued, and the FTSE 100 was down 32.28 points, or 0.5 percent, at 6,311.32 by 0746 GMT, taking its losses since Thursday's close to 1.6 percent and retreating further from a 5-year peak of 6,533.99 points set last month. "This slow grind up we've had in equity markets seems to have hit the first warning points. We've had some opening sellers into equity markets and indexes, and we haven't seen that kind of activity for some time," said Jordan Hiscott, sales trader at Gekko Global Markets. Implied volatility on the UK blue chip index - based on options prices and seen as a crude barometer of investor risk aversion - rose 4.2 percent, just off one-week highs. Sentiment was hurt by concerns about the strength of global growth after soft U.S. and Chinese data this week, and by geopolitical tensions following deadly bomb explosions in Boston, which a White House official said would be treated as an "act of terror". New threats of military action from North Korea also kept markets in a more cautious mood and technical charts showed scope for more weakness on the FTSE 100. "The FTSE has posted two consecutive lower tops - following the peak in the middle of last month - and, while it might be a bit early to start talking about the development of a downtrend, the best that can be said of the latest price action is that it represents a consolidation phase, following the breach of the medium-term uptrend," Bill McNamara, technical analyst at Charles Stanley, said in a note. He highlighted the area around 6,214 - some 1.5 percent below current levels and just above the 100-day moving average - as the next key technical support. The quarterly earnings season could provide a more fundamental catalyst for a leg down, with STOXX Europe 600 companies forecast to undershoot expectations by 3.9 percent, according to Thomson Reuters StarMine. Weak numbers from LVMH, one of the first European companies to report first quarter numbers, weighed on Burberry , whose shares fell 1.7 percent on Tuesday. (Editing by Stephen Nisbet) Link this Share this Digg this Email Reprints

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