London pre-open: Moderate gains expected

24th Nov 2011 07:20

With Asian indices mixed this morning, and Wall Street closed today for Thanksgiving, the Footsie is expected to open just slightly higher. City sources predict the FTSE 100 will open up 18 points from yesterday's close of 5,140.Likely to be weighing on market sentiment is a report in Bloomberg which suggests that Japan may be close to a downgrade from Standard & Poor's. "Japan's finances are getting worse and worse every day, every second," the director of sovereign ratings at S&P in Singapore told the news agency. When asked what this means for the nation's credit rating, he said that it "may be right in saying that we're closer to a downgrade. But the deterioration has been gradual so far, and it's not like we're going to move today."In London, Thursday's results agenda is dominated by a company which now won't be issuing its figures this week: Thomas Cook. The company yanked its results announcement scheduled for Thursday while it holds another round of emergency talks with its bankers to winkle out some more cash to tide it over the bleak mid-winter period. Electricals retailer Dixons Retail said that total underlying group sales (excluding those from closed businesses) rose just 1% from £3.27bn to £3.29bn in the 12 weeks to 15 October, as strong grown in the Nordics region was helped by falling sales in the UK and Ireland. Pre-tax profit jumped to £2.4m, from a a loss of £11.4m the year before.Infrastructure group Balfour Beatty has been awarded the Whitechapel Crossrail contract worth £110m. The project, awarded to a joint venture between Balfour, Morgan Sindall and Vinci Construction, includes the demolition of the existing station, construction of a new ticket hall, platform upgrades and the construction of a new station.Water group Pennon has raised its interim dividend by 9.6% after what chairman Ken Harvey hailed as "another successful half year". Group revenues rose by 8.3% to £642.6m, while the firm reported an 11.6% rise in first half pre-tax profits.BC