London markets follow US fall

London markets fell on opening this morning, following a poor day on the US exchanges yesterday on the back of a gloomy economic outlook from the Federal Reserve.

While announcing a widely expected cut in interest rates yesterday, the US reserve commented that weakening business and consumer sales are serious enough to prompt a "rapid and forceful response of monetary policy". Subsequently the Nasdaq fell 2.3 per cent to end the day at 2772 points, led by falls for all the big tech stocks, including Microsoft, Oracle and Cisco. In early trading the FTSE 100 index was down 25 points and the TechMARK fell by 20 points, or one per cent. The early UK tech decline was led by modest falls for telcos Vodafone and BT. However, free ISP Freeserve bucked the trend, rising three per cent to 145p.