There was an element of "the morning after the night before" in London's equity market yesterday, and there was a "party pooper" too in the technology sector.

But overall it was another reasonably good showing from a stock market still in a state of semi-shock after the dramatic events of Wednesday afternoon, when the US Federal Reserve chopped US interest rates for the fourth time this year by 50 basis points.

While the FTSE 100 blew hot and cold during the session and the Techmark 100 had to rally from initial weakness, the rest of the indices were firmly in positive territory throughout the day, with dealers reporting a flow of buying orders for the smaller capitalised stocks.

The FTSE 100 index swung in a near-100 point arc during the session, pushing up 53 points in the first hour of the day and looking likely to launch an attack on the 6,000 level, but ran back to a low of 5,844.7, before settling 18.6 off at 5,871.6.

The Techmark 100 closed up 8.52 at 1,992.75, having touched a session best of 2,012.86. The FTSE 250 was finally 42.9 better at 6,249.8 and the SmallCap up 30.5 at 2,951.0.

March inflation data, showing UK headline inflation at a 13-month low and the underlying rate unchanged at 1.9 per cent, year-on-year, did nothing to deter optimists hoping for another UK interest rate cut.

The next meeting of the Bank of England's monetary policy committee is scheduled for May 9th-10th. Hopes that the committee will cut again were given a big boost when the minutes of the April 5th committee meeting showed three members voted for a 50 basis points cut; the committee voted 6-3 to cut rates by 25 basis points.

Most of the tech stocks continued to make rapid progress in the wake of the excellent showing by the Nasdaq Composite and the latest batch of better-than-expected US tech results. But CMG Group, the Anglo/Dutch IT services/software group, shocked the market with a profits warning. CMG shares fell over 22 per cent at worst, dragging down other software stocks, such as Logica, with it.

Turnover expanded rapidly as private investors, gradually regaining their confidence after the horrors of the past 15 months, began to return to the market. Volume reached a hefty 2.8 billion shares by 6 p.m. Market trades jumped to 157,000.