Futures information from the brokerage IG suggested the FTSE 100 was set to open down by more than 0.9% after Friday’s record close at 10,910. That prediction, made late on Sunday, would be expected to shift in advance of the market open in Europe.<\/p>\n
Energy stocks should benefit from higher wholesale prices. Precious metal miners could get a boost too from a rush towards safe havens, with gold, for example, building on Friday’s rise – an increase that came in sympathy with oil.<\/p>\n
Kathleen Brookes, research director at XTB, said of the stocks at risk: “Airlines and hotel groups could sell off sharply at the start of this week, as flights are grounded and airspace remains closed in the Middle East.<\/p>\n
“Holiday bookings over the lucrative Easter period may also start getting cancelled, after reports that Iran launched drones at UK military bases in Cyprus”, she wrote.<\/p>\n
In Asia, the dollar strengthened in early dealing and took more than half a cent off the pound, to stand just above $1.34 – sterling’s lowest level since late January.<\/p>\n
There was also support for the safe-haven Japanese yen and the Swiss franc.<\/p>\n
Another source of safety in troubled times – gold – rose by almost 2%, above the $5,360 per ounce level, before easing to $5,348.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Futures information from the brokerage IG suggested the FTSE 100 was set to open down by more than…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":324723,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-324722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324722"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324722\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/324723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}