It’s certainly a quiet end to the week when it comes to market moving news, but microcap Roquefort Therapeutics found its shares off by as much as 10% in early trade following an update from the business over a fundraising. Noting that advisers had been sounding out the market, incorrect comments on bulletin boards regarding a speculative placing price resulted in abnormal moves for the company’s valuation, which dropped by around a third on Thursday. This is being used as justification to not proceed with a placing at this time and does little to bolster the case for companies of this size looking to raise funding in public markets.
Oil giant Shell issued a first quarter production update this morning, which proved sufficient to make it one of the few FTSE-100 stocks to sit in positive territory shortly after the open. The general theme here was one of metrics seeing modest upratings and that’s been sufficient to lift the stock by around 0.16% in the first hour of trading. That needs to be put in the context of the FTSE-100 sitting some 1% lower however, as the broader market reacts to yesterday’s sell-off in the US following concerns that the Federal Reserve may still be reluctant to cut rates.
The sports-fashion retail company JD saw its share price under pressure ahead of the weekend break with the stock trading down by a little over 3% in early trade. There’s been no news here since last week’s full year trading update, but the company does have significant exposure in the US market and if there are questions as to whether the Federal Reserve may want to keep interest rates higher for longer, then its discretionary consumer spend that stands to suffer as a result.
Headlines we expect to see on Monday
Bango PLC Final Results
This time last year Revenues up 38% to $28.5m, Cash $12.7m, Adjusted EBITDA $5m
