More substantial downside pressure was exerted on London's equity market yesterday, with the FTSE 100 looking extremely weary, posting its third consecutive decline and slipping below the 5,800 level in doing so.
And there was more bad news for investors as the weakness in the leaders spread right across the board, encompassing the FTSE 250, SmallCap and the Techmark 100 index.
At the close, the FTSE 100 had dropped below the 5,800 mark to close 67.0 off at 5,796.9, having fallen 75.0 to 5,788.9 at its worst of the session, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average posted a three-figure loss and the Nasdaq Composite followed up Tuesday's 75 points slide with a similar fall.
The latest decline in the Footsie extended its fall over the past three sessions to 119.0, or 2 per cent.
London dealers had briefly been encouraged by the Footsie's mid-morning bounce from the 5,800 level but generally remained sceptical about the FTSE 100's ability to launch a determined run at 6,000, although some felt the market would attempt an election rally which they claimed might provide the ammunition for such a move.
There were various reasons being put forward for the market's latest weakness.
The most potent of these was the sudden loss of confidence in the Nasdaq Composite on Wall Street on Tuesday, where the technology-laden Nasdaq dropped more than 3 per cent, unsettled initially by earnings downgrades.
Sun Microsystems issued a profits warning after the US close. And if that was not enough for London to cope with, Alcatel, the French telecoms equipment manufacturer, which pulled out of merger discussions with Lucent of the US on Tuesday evening, shocked the Paris market with news of a profits warning and a big writedown.
That news was sufficient to pull the rug from under the tech-related stocks.
And adding to the gloom for the technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) sectors was a report suggesting that Oftel, the telecoms industry regulator, could be considering a price charge cap on Vodafone.
