- FTSE 100 down 54 points at 10,778
- Aviva upgraded
- Wall Street trends higher
- Miners lead the decline
3.21pm: London lags New York
The FTSE 100 was down 54 points as Thursday afternoon wore on, apparently unmoved by the rather more cheerful mood across the Atlantic.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 both added around 0.3% after the Producer Price Index came in below expectations, with core readings slowing on both a monthly and annual basis.
That is two soft inflation prints in two days, following Wednesday's cooler consumer prices figure.
Traders duly trimmed bets on a September rate hike from the Federal Reserve, though the split among policymakers looks intact and most still pencil in at least one increase this year.
Jobless claims muddied things slightly, with first-time filings up on the week but continuing claims falling.
Oil eased as President Trump shifted towards economic pressure over military action.
Cisco and Cerebras both tanked after results, a reminder that beating expectations and pleasing investors are different things.
1.51pm: Insurance deck shuffled
JP Morgan has reshuffled the deck with its coverage of the insurance sector. The American bank has upgraded Aviva to 'overweight' and downgraded Legal & General Group and M&G to 'underweight', arguing that relative value across the UK life insurance sector has shifted. The bank reiterated its 'overweight' rating on Standard Life.
UK life insurers have outperformed the SXIP European insurance index by 2 percentage points and the FTSE 100 by 6 points so far this year.
Corporate restructuring and merger speculation have driven much of that move.
Aviva, the FTSE 100 insurer, is the exception, having lagged its peers and de-rated against them.
JPM believes that leaves attractive relative upside.
The clearest ground for comparing the stocks is cash flow and capital returns rather than reported profits.
1.00pm: Footsie claws back some ground ahead flat open on Wall Street
The FTSE 100 was down 28 points at 10,805.60 by mid-morning, though that leaves it comfortably off the lows it touched earlier in the session.
Not a rout, then, more a market that got out of bed on the wrong side and has since had a coffee.
The mood is one of waiting rather than worrying.
Attention is on this afternoon's US producer prices reading, which follows Wednesday's consumer inflation figures showing a cooling in July.
Traders took enough comfort from that number to fade bets on a September rate hike from the Federal Reserve, though policymakers remain split and most still expect at least one increase before the year ends.
US initial jobless claims are due at the same time, after last week's distinctly underwhelming employment report.
Wall Street futures were barely budging ahead of it all, which tells you most of what you need to know.
11.25am: Antofagasta warning pulls miners and FTSE 100 lower
Copper miner Antofagasta was the FTSE 100's biggest faller after cutting its production guidance for the year, and it took the rest of the mining sector down with it.
The shares dropped 5% to 3,835p after the group said it now expected to produce 625,000 to 655,000 tonnes of copper in 2026, against earlier guidance of 650,000 to 700,000 tonnes.
Blame the weather: severe storms in Chile forced a shutdown at the Los Pelambres mine and prompted the government to declare a state of catastrophe in the Coquimbo region.
That rather overshadowed a decent set of half-year numbers, with underlying earnings up 27% to $2.84 billion, ahead of forecasts, and a bigger than expected interim dividend of 30.1 cents.
Peel Hunt, which keeps a hold rating and a 3,610p target, called the guidance cut the sting in the tail.
The read-across left the wider resources sector under pressure and helped drag the FTSE 100 down 30 points.
9.27am: Scottish Mortgage heads the risers
Scottish Mortgage rose 1.8%, one of the few blue chips in the green, and the reason sits several thousand miles west.
US inflation eased for a second month in July to 3.4%, with core down to 2.5%, the softest in five months.
That has knocked the implied odds of a September Fed hike back to just above 40% and pulled the two-year Treasury yield down to 4.20%.
Lower yields flatter long-duration growth stocks, which is precisely what Baillie Gifford's flagship owns.
Then the AI infrastructure trade did the rest.
CoreWeave jumped on 112% revenue growth, Super Micro more than doubled earnings estimates, and Nvidia, a top ten holding, added 2.7%.
TSMC, ASML, Amazon and Meta sit nearby in the portfolio, with SpaceX preference shares accounting for more than a tenth of it.
8.30am: Miners drag FTSE 100 lower as metals rally runs out of road
Mining shares dragged the FTSE 100 down more than 50 points on Thursday, unwinding a chunk of the sector's recent gains as metal prices lost momentum.
Antofagasta, the Chilean-focused copper producer, was the worst performer, down 4.79% at 3,842p.
Rio Tinto fell 4.08% to 7,217p, Fresnillo dropped 3.81% to 2,897p, Endeavour Mining lost 2.71% at 4,176p and Anglo American slipped 2.59% to 3,953.5p.
The selling follows an unusually strong stretch for the sector, with copper reaching record levels on the London Metal Exchange last week above $14,200 a tonne.
Much of that move was driven by supply worries rather than demand, including the Democratic Republic of Congo's ban on exports of copper concentrate and the continued diversion of metal into US warehouses ahead of possible import tariffs.
Goldman Sachs has since played down the Congolese ban, saying it expects little impact on global copper balances.
The demand side looks weaker.
Chinese imports of unwrought copper and copper products fell 11.5% year on year in July to 425,000 tonnes, with the seven-month total down 6.2%.
Consumer and producer prices in China also slowed last month, pointing to soft domestic activity in the market that consumes more than half the world's copper.
Precious metals were similarly subdued, with silver slipping back below $65 an ounce after touching a seven-week high earlier in the session.
Traders are waiting on US producer price figures due later, having seen consumer inflation ease for a second month to 3.4% in July.
That has trimmed the implied odds of a Federal Reserve rate rise in September to roughly 40%, from close to 50% a day earlier.
Elevated oil prices are also weighing on sentiment, with the Strait of Hormuz still closed and rhetoric between Washington and Tehran hardening again.
For a sector that has powered much of the FTSE 100's recent advance, the reversal is a reminder of how quickly the trade can turn.
7.30am: UK economy holds up
Not bad, all things considered. The economy grew 0.4% in the second quarter, down from 0.6% in the first, which counts as a decent result for a three-month stretch that included a war in Iran and all the energy price jitters that came with it.
June did the heavy lifting, up 0.3% when economists had pencilled in a flat month.
Services carried the quarter, with information and communication up 2.7% and computer programming up 3.7%, so the tech end of the economy is clearly still busy.
Manufacturing managed 1.0%, thanks largely to a 4.2% jump in pharmaceuticals, but utilities went backwards and dragged production to a standstill.
Construction eked out 0.3% and remains 2.0% smaller than a year ago, which tells you something about the state of the sector.
For the Bank of England, a resilient economy with a 2.9% GDP deflator does not exactly scream urgency on rate cuts.
Ahead of the open
The FTSE 100 is expected to open 23 points higher on Thursday, tracking a broad advance across Asian markets.
Korea, a global hub for the computer hardware industry, led the gainers as investors pushed back into technology stocks after the summer rout.
Confidence was helped by US inflation data showing prices slowing last month, easing fears of an imminent interest rate rise.
July's consumer price index reading came in line with forecasts and followed figures pointing to a softer jobs market.
That gives the Federal Reserve room to keep borrowing costs on hold for now.
South Korea's Kospi surged almost 5% in the opening minutes, with chipmakers SK hynix and Samsung clawing back losses from the sector-wide selloff that ran from late June through July.
Tokyo and Shanghai also advanced, though Hong Kong, Singapore and Sydney dipped.
Bargain-hunting has supported the bounce, as have strong earnings from Amazon, Microsoft and, more recently, CoreWeave.
Oil slipped more than 1%, snapping a six-day run of gains, as traders watched the US-Iran standoff with the Strait of Hormuz still shut.
