Royal Bank of Scotland (LSE: RBS.L - news) suffered the sharpest fall as a contraction in Britain's economy helped send London's benchmark index deeper into the red.
The high street bank slipped 3.3pc, leading the large-cap fallers as the FTSE 100 dropped 44 points to 5707. With investors already unnerved by debt talks dragging on in Greece, news of a 0.2pc fall in Britain's GDP during the final quarter of 2011 did little to lift the mood.
But, losses were limited by the fact that the contraction came as little surprise. Joshua Raymond, chief market strategist at City Index, said that "the fall in GDP had been long expected given the headwinds facing the services sector and the breakdown of activity in the Eurozone, a large UK trading partner".
"The lack of significant market reaction is likely to be down to the fact that today’s data will have been of no real surprise to most investors,” he added.
As risk appetite waned, miners were also out of favour. Antofagasta (Xetra: 867578 - news) dropped 1.8pc and Xstrata (Dusseldorf: XTR.DU - news) fell 1.6pc. Commodities (Santiago: COMMODITIES.SN - news) trader, Glencore International, dipped 1.6pc as UBS (NYSEArca: DJCI - news) cut its price target to 490p from 530p.
Having been downgraded by RBS earlier this week, Ashmore (LSE: ASHM.L - news) rallied 4.6pc after Barclays Capital upped the asset manager to "overweight".
Against a "pessimistic backdrop" for the industry, due to deteriorating retail confidence in the UK and Europe (Chicago Options: ^REURUSD - news) , BarCap said it prefers emerging-market focused Ashmore, among UK-listed asset managers.
Tussling with Ashmore for the top spot was ARM Holdings (LSE: ARM.L - news) , designer of microchips for gadgets such as Apple (NasdaqGS: AAPL - news) 's iPhone. After Apple smashed Wall Street expectations with profits more than doubling in the last quarter, ARM put on 4pc.
"It reads positively for ARM," said Didier Scemama, an analyst at RBS.
"Apple is not the only customer of ARM -- they supply virtually every smartphone and tablet with their cheap designs -- but from a sentiment standpoint there has been a strong correlation between the two share prices."
Amongst the second-liners, Renishaw (LSE: RSW.L - news) soread more than 17pc after the precision engineer flagged a recovery in its key electronics market.
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