London pre-open: Stocks seen up on positive Wall St cues

London stocks were set for a higher open on Tuesday after the bank holiday weekend, following a record session on Wall Street.

Oanda analyst Jeffrey Halley said: "In a flashback to the future, US markets fully returned to work overnight and partied like it was 2020. Stock markets powered higher; the US dollar fell at the expense of risk-correlated currencies, US yields eased slightly, and industrial metals rose. Gold and cryptos both had positive days with only oil suffering, which we will discuss later.

"There seems to have been a delayed reaction to Friday's impressive non-farm payrolls. The whole buy everything process being given another sugar rush by the US ISM non-manufacturing PMI blowing forecasts out of the water.

"Markit services PMI had outperformed as it rose to 60.40, but the ISM data stole the show. Non-manufacturing PMI for March rose to 63.70 versus 59.0 expected, as the US reaps the Covid-19 jabs in arms, stimulus cheques peace dividend faster than expected."

In UK corporate news, discount carrier Wizz Air transported 40% more passengers in March versus the month before to reach 768,113. But the Eastern Europe-focused airline's load factor dropped from 69.8% to 62.5%, as management added to capacity, with the number of available seats being increased from 382,928 to 480,203.

The company's load factor was thus 29.4% below its year-earlier level, versus 24 percentage points less in February. The rolling load factor for the last 12 months meanwhile was at 63.9%, against 67.1% in February, and 29.6 percentage points beneath its year earlier level. The 12-month average load factor to the end of February was 26.5 points below its year-earlier level.

Oil giant BP said it expected to hit its $35bn net debt target during the first quarter of 2021 after faster-than-expected progress on its disposals programme.

The company had forecast raising $4bn ‑ $6bn from disposals and said proceeds would now be at the upper end of this range.

"This is a result of earlier than anticipated delivery of disposal proceeds combined with very strong business performance during the first quarter. We look forward to updating the market at our first quarter results, including further information on share buybacks," said chief executive Bernard Looney.