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Strong gains by banks ease ISEQ towards the 3,000 point mark

By Geoff Percival - Thursday, November 05, 2009

STRONG gains for the banks and other key Irish stocks dragged the ISEQ back up towards the 3,000 point mark as it reclaimed nearly 4% after a poor showing in the past week.

Despite posting a near €1 billion pre-tax loss for its first half, Bank of Ireland’s claim that it is beginning to see signs of a slowdown in the economic downturn in its core markets and that it doesn’t think its previous estimates of future loan losses will worsen helped its share price to a near 25% (34c) bounce to €1.75.

AIB was up nearly 17%, or 24c, at €1.69 and Irish Life & Permanent (IL&P) gained just under 7.5%, or 32c, to close at €4.65.

Yesterday’s gains were just a clawback of what was lost on Tuesday — AIB lost 23c, Bank of Ireland dropped 20c and IL&P lost 91c.

Elsewhere, the construction-related stocks also had a good day with CRH up 67c at €17.61; Grafton Group gaining 19c to close up nearly 6% at €3.39 and insulation specialist Kingspan up 30c at €5.70.

Pharmaceuticals followed suit, with Elan continuing its good run with another 17c (4.5%) gain to €3.95 and Merrion Pharmaceuticals up by 15c at €3.35.

Elsewhere, DCC was up by 30c at €18 and Paddy Power regained 56c to close at €21.14.

The ISEQ, on a whole, was up by 3.99% (112 points) at 2,923.82 points.

Dublin’s gains were replicated elsewhere. Tokyo’s Nikkei returned from its public holiday lay-off to have a rare ‘up’ day, gaining 0.4% to 9,844 points. US markets showed early gains ahead of the Fed’s interest rate decision today.

All three main European markets also showed strong recoveries with the FTSE in London, up by 1.4% at 5,108; Paris’s CAC up 2.4% at 3,670 and the DAX in Frankfurt gaining 1.7% to close at 5,444.

Both the European Central Bank (ECB) and the Bank of England are also due to update interest rate stances today.

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