Hurricane clean-up boosts Ashtead at half-year, Indivior schizophrenia treatment accepted for FDA review
London open
The FTSE 100 is expected to open 17 points higher on Tuesday, having closed up 0.8% at 7,453.48 on Monday.
Stocks to watch
Industrial equipment rental firm Ashtead said half year earnings were boosted by clean-up efforts after hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria and the weak pound as it posted a 16% rise in pre-tax profits to £493.1m. The company added that it was starting a share buyback programme, of at least £500m and up to £1bn over the next 18 months.
GlaxoSmithKline has presented promising new data from the dose expansion phase of the DREAMM-1 study of GSK2857916, an investigational anti-B-cell maturation antigen (BCMA) antibody-drug conjugate. The FTSE 100 drugmaker said that in the study of 35 heavily pre-treated multiple myeloma patients, GSK2857916 monotherapy demonstrated a 60% response rate and a median progression free survival of 7.9 months. Results were presented during an oral presentation at the 59th annual meeting of the American Society for Hematology (ASH).
A one-monthly schizophrenia treatment developed by heroin-addiction specialist Indivior has been accepted for review by the US drug regulator. The Food and Drug Administration will work with Indivior towards a decision on whether to approve RBP-7000, an injectable dose of risperidone via the Atrigel delivery system, as a marketable drug by late July next year.
Newspaper round-up
Philip Hammond has joined other EU treasury ministers in warning President Trump about tax plans that they say would breach international agreements and hammer the City of London. In a letter they express “significant concerns” that the Trump administration’s tax plans would have a “major distortive impact on international trade”. - The Times
The closure of a major North Sea pipeline after a crack was discovered will have wide-reaching implications for the oil and gas industry, experts have said. They said even a closure of a few weeks would have significant impacts on the industry. The price of Brent, the international benchmark, briefly rose to a two-year high of above $65 (£47) a barrel after the announcement, up from $63 at the start of the day. - Guardian
More than a quarter of FTSE 100 chairmen fall foul of plans to shake-up British boardrooms so they are not full of the same old faces. Reforms to the corporate governance code proposed by the Financial Reporting Council state that chairmen should not serve more than nine years on the board, with research by governance analysts Manifest finding more than 90 major UK-based companies have chairmen who have been on the board for longer than this – including 27 in the FTSE 100 index. - Mail
Social media companies should face fines or prosecution for failing to remove racist, extremist or child sex abuse content, an influential committee will tell the government tomorrow. Theresa May’s independent ethics watchdog will recommend laws to shift the liability for illegal content on to social media firms, which would recast the companies as publishers and stop them describing themselves as platforms with no control over the millions of messages and videos that they host. - The Times
Comcast said it is no longer looking to buy 21st Century Fox's assets, in yet another sign that a deal between Fox and Disney is nearing completion. Comcast-owned CNBC first reported the cable giant's interest in the block of assets, specifically Fox's 39pc stake in Sky, its film studio and a significant portion of its TV assets, early last month, just weeks after it emerged that Disney had been in talks with Fox over the same assets. - Telegraph
Rogue banks, insurers and investment firms have been hit with a tenfold increase in fines by the City watchdog. The Financial Conduct Authority has doled out £229.4m of penalties this year, up from £22.2m in 2016. - Mail
US close
Markets in the US pushed further into record territory on Monday, as investors eyed a rate announcement from the Federal Reserve later in the week.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.23% at 24,386.03, the S&P 500 added 0.32% to 2,659.99, and the Nasdaq 100 ended the session 0.78% higher at 6,393.89.
"The Dow Jones, S&P 500 and NASDAQ 100 are edging higher as the US indices appear to have shrugged off the negative sentiment that crept in at the start of the month,” said CMC Markets’ David Madden.
“2017 has been an impressive year for US equity benchmarks and we could see another round of record highs from the before the year is out.”
The Fed's rate announcement is scheduled for Wednesday, with the Bank of England and European Central Bank also due to announce their own latest policy decisions the following day.
Ahead of the US central bank's policy announcement, Gregory Daco, chief US economist at Oxford Economics, forecast America's gross domestic product would expand at a 2.7% pace in 2018, helped by fiscal stimulus - which would lift the rate of GDP growth by 0.3 percentage points.
Based on the above, and expectations for global GDP growth to pick-up from 2.9% in 2017 to 3.2% in 2018, Daco projected the Fed would hike interest rates three times over the course of the following year.