FTSE falls despite R&SA life sale

Royal & Sun Alliance Insurance Group has finally managed to sell its life assurance operation to Resolution Life – a company which buys with-profits books to trade and manage the assets in bulk – for £850m.

This has boosted its share price by 1.25p or 2.3% to 79.75p however the FTSE 100 index is still down 12.8 points or 0.3% to 4405.9 within the first hour of trading.

Lloyds TSB dropped 1p or 0.2% to 412.75p after reporting fiurst-half profits are down 6% evrn though it sold New Zealand and Brazil operations to focus on its home market.

The FTSE All-Share index is also down 4.73 points or 0.2% to 2189 while the FTSE 250 index is flat at 6015.

In Asia, markets managed to pull back thanks to strong trading reports from Matsushita Electric and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing.

This lifted the Japanese Nikkei 225 index by 1.9% to 11,325 but the market still closed down 5% on the month.

Taiwan Semiconductor – the largest global supplier of made-to-order computer chips - leapt 4.6% to NT$42.90 after reporting Q2 profit doubled to NT$23.4bn compared with the previous year.

In the US, the Nasdaq made the best gains of the day, having closed up 22.8 points or 1.2% to 1881 while the Dow Jones index gained just 12 points or 0.1% to 10129.

IFAonline

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• Dow Jones
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