Yahoo Finance FTSE falls and Wall Street mixed amid LSE outage and US jobs data
How major markets are performing on Tuesday
On Wall Street, the S&P 500 (^GSPC) fell 0.1% by the time of the European close, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq (^IXIC) was 0.3% higher. The Dow Jones (^DJI) slipped 0.3%.
It came as job openings across America declined, a sign that the US labour market could be weakening. This was a drop of over 600,000 compared with the previous month, when there were around 9.3 million vacancies, and looks to be the lowest since 2021.
The number of job openings decreased to 8.7 million on the last business day of October, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported on Tuesday.
Pierre Veyret, technical analyst at ActivTrades, said: "Investors are experiencing patchy performances across all sectors as they struggle to reconcile positive dovish hints from ECB official Isabel Schnabel with the debt situation in China, which remains a dark cloud for equity traders.”
European stock markets were mixed on Tuesday, after a lacklustre start to the week. It came as the London Stock Exchange (LSEG.L) faced two outages during the morning, hitting trading in hundreds of small cap stocks.
Read more: FTSE: London Stock Exchange outage halts trading for 2,200 shares
The FTSE 100 (^FTSE) underperformed against its continental peers, 0.3% down on the day as the financial sector took a hit after ratings agency Moody’s cut its outlook on China’s government credit ratings to “negative” from “stable”.
Meanwhile the CAC (^FCHI) gained 0.8% in Paris, and the Frankfurt DAX (^GDAXI) was 0.9% up.
Tuesday's trading outage was the fourth in two months, with FTSE 100 and 250 (^FTMC) stocks unaffected by the halt. Trading was suspended in around 2,200 smaller shares, including online retailer Asos (ASC.L), drinks maker Fevertree (FEVR.L) and polling company YouGov (YOU.L).
The exchange said: "The London Stock Exchange is still investigating an incident.
"We are undertaking immediate analysis and will provide further updates through our live service portal. Currently only FTSE 100, FTSE 250 and IOB securities are available for trading."
It also came as new data revealed that UK annual grocery inflation had fallen to 9.1% in the four weeks to 26 November, down from 9.7% a month earlier, according to Kantar.
The group also predicted that supermarket sales will surpass £13bn for the first time ever this December, with 22 December set to be the busiest day for festive grocery shopping.
“The scene is set for record-breaking spend through the supermarket tills this Christmas," Fraser McKevitt, head of retail and consumer insight at Kantar, said.
“The festive period is always a bumper one for the grocers, with consumers buying on average 10% more items than in a typical month. Some of the increase, of course, will also be driven by the ongoing price inflation we’ve seen this year.”
Read more: How first-time buyers can get on the property ladder in a cost of living crisis
Meanwhile London stocks were also being weighed down by a rebound in the US dollar as well as weakness in basic resources and energy prices, while investors take a pause after the gains of the past couple of weeks.
"US markets fared little better, sliding back in the face of a modest rebound in yields as investors hit the pause button ahead of this week’s jobs data, which is due at the end of the week," Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets, said.
He added: "There is certainly an element of the market getting ahead of itself when you look at a US economy that grew at 5.1% in Q3 and still has an unemployment rate of 3.9%.
The same sadly cannot be said for Europe where the French and German economies could well already be in recession."
Watch: How does inflation affect interest rates?
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