Market Report: Holiday season sees Tui Travel in demand

With much of the City on holiday, Tui Travel is in demand. The travel group climbed 7.8p to 369.7p in strong trade after great results from its German parent company Tui AG, which is piloting a £5.6bn merger with its UK subsidiary. It revealed a 89 per cent jump in third-quarter profits.

Tui’s performance and conciliatory comments from Vladimir Putin over the situation in Ukraine helped offset weak Eurozone growth figures and the FTSE 100 climbed 28.58 points to reach 6,685.26.

G4S was among the losers, down 6.9p at 266.6p. Many found it hard to resist taking some profit after the outsourcing giant closed at its highest level since May 2013 yesterday.

Property companies were in demand, with British Land booking a 17.5p increase to 724.5p, Land Securities up 24p at 1090p and LSL Property Services putting on 9.75p to 358.25p.

On the mid-cap index, Ophir Energy was buoyed 13.2p to 211.7p as it announced plans to hand $100m back to investors through a share buyback. The FTSE 250 oil and gas explorer also revealed a return to profit in the first half. The African-focused operator made a pre-tax profit of $589.4m, compared to a loss of $19.4m in the same period last year.

Centamin had less luck, despite also announcing a cash windfall for investors. A maiden dividend of 0.87 cents a share, or $10m, was not enough to stop the Egyptian gold miner sliding 4.6p to 69.9p as quarterly revenue fell 24 per cent.

On AIM, Brainjuicer avoided a headache despite one of its biggest shareholders offloading almost its entire stake. The market researcher’s third biggest investor Nomad Investment Partnership cut its holding from 7 per cent to 0.64 per cent. Brainjuicer climbed 7p to 354.5p.

Mariana Resources tumbled 0.52p to 2.07p after a test at its Condor de Oro copper and gold mine in Peru failed to turn up any economic grade ore.

Plans to tackle the black hole in its balance sheet helped cloud computing firm Outsourcery put on 0.5p to 23p. The company. headed by Dragons’ Den star Piers Linney, revealed measures to raise £4.5m in working capital.