Good morning from London, where the FTSE 100 is down below 7,500 points at fresh two-week lows. The index has been suffering from the uncertainty in the Middle East throughout this week, but some fresh data from the ONS this morning isn’t helping either. Retail sales fell by 0.9% in September, a much steeper drop than the City forecasts of around 0.4%. And the closely watched GfK survey showed consumer confidence has plunged in the run-up to the festive season, owing to all this dour news for British consumers.
An outage that halted trading of small caps late yesterday also unsettled investors, though the LSE said it expects normal business today. Big cap stocks in the FTSE 350 weren’t affected.
Intercontinental Hotels Group PLC (LSE:IHG)’s share price is down this morning despite an ostensibly positive Q3 update that showed a double-digit increase in revenue per available room. The firm said in its press release that travel demand and pricing are both in good shape, with occupancy of its global network now on par with pre-Covid levels.
Finally, ChatGPT developer Open AI is now worth US$86bn if plans to sell a chunk of employee-owned shares take place at the price suggested. That valuation would put the Microsoft-backed group almost on par with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and TikTok's parent Bytedance.
That’s all for this morning, keep up with all the latest news on our Proactive website and have a great weekend.