BEST AND WORST PERFORMING SECTORS

The Best performing sector in the FT-SE 100 last week was health care, which rose 4.8 per cent on the week. The sector includes medical diagnostic stocks, which rose on optimism that new products and growing sales will drive profit growth ahead rapidly. Drew Scientific and Tepnel Life Sciences were the biggest gainers.

The second best performing sector was water, which rose 3.3 per cent on reports that an incoming Labour government will propose a windfall tax that will raise between pounds 3bn and pounds 5bn rather than pounds 10bn that had previously been feared.

THE WORST performing sector was electronics and electrical equipment, which fell 2.5 per cent on the week. GEC, the sector bellwether, dropped 3.5 per cent after suffering two setbacks to its efforts to expand in France. The French government, citing security reasons, has prevented it from bidding for a controlling stake in defence electronics maker Thomson- CSF. Framatome, a nuclear reactor maker, said its planned merger with GEC Alsthom was also unlikely to succeed. Copyright: IOS & Bloomberg