London’s FTSE 100 crossed 7,000 points on Friday to reach its highest level since February last year as investors piled into the “value” sectors that feature heavily in the UK blue-chip index.
The FTSE closed up 0.5 per cent at 7,019, breaching the 7,000 threshold for the first time since the coronavirus crisis swept through Europe, led higher by financials, basic materials and industrial stocks.
Similar bets were visible on Wall Street, where the S&P 500 was up 0.4 per cent to a new record at the market close in New York, with basic materials the top-performing sector of the blue-chip index. The tech-focused Nasdaq Composite rose 0.1 per cent while the Dow Jones Industrial Average and FTSE All-Word benchmarks both climbed to fresh peaks.
The moves followed strong retail sales and employment figures released in the US on Thursday and record quarterly gross domestic product data from China, which often moves markets despite analysts’ long-held misgivings about the validity of the statistics.
US retail sales rose in March by the most in 10 months, while…
