Pearson profits come in better than expected, Rightmove earnings rise

London open

The FTSE 100 is expected to open 18 points higher on Friday, having closed up 0.37% on Thursday at 7,944.04.

Stocks to watch

Educational publisher Pearson reported a better-than-expected rise in annual profits driven by revenue growth and cost savings and said it would grow sales by low to mid single digits this year. The company on Friday reported an 11% rise in Adjusted operating profit to £456m, compared with a company compiled consensus forecast of £446 million.

Property portal Rightmove posted a rise in full-year operating profit on Friday as it highlighted "resilient traffic despite a significantly less frenetic property market than 2021". In the year to the end of December 2022, operating profit was up 7% at £241.3m, with revenues 9% higher at £332.6m. Rightmove said customers continued to upgrade their packages and to increase their use of digital products.

Newspaper round-up

More than 3,000 National Express bus drivers in the West Midlands have voted to strike over pay, starting on 16 March, the same day as the next RMT train strike. The Unite union said members voted 96% in favour of industrial action, on a turnout of 72%. The workers will begin “all-out continuous” strike action on Thursday 16 March, the union said, with industrial action to carry on until the dispute is resolved. – Guardian

Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz declared almost a decade ago that 2014 “was the last year in which the United States could claim to be the world’s largest economic power.” It was, he claimed, the start of the “Chinese century”. He was wrong: the US remains the world’s largest economy. Yet experts keep predicting that China will soon become the preeminent global superpower, now believing that China’s GDP will overtake America in the late 2030s. – Telegraph

Hooking up millions of electric vehicles, heat pumps and other devices to the UK's electricity grid could save up to £4.7bn a year by the end of this decade, the energy watchdog has predicted. Ofgem on Thursday set out proposals for how the electricity grid of the future could work, using technology to ensure infrastructure is used as efficiently as possible. – Telegraph

Esken, the listed company spun out of the old Eddie Stobart trucking business that plans to create a sixth London airport at Southend, has announced that it is to sell the empty site as well as other assets. The former Stobart Group changed its name to Esken, which means “arise” in old English, in an attempt to get away from a controversial past punctuated by High Court litigation. – The Times

An ambitious state-backed project intended to enable everyone in Britain to see all their pension arrangements on one screen has been delayed because of the complexity of connecting the first pension schemes. The government said yesterday that “additional time” was needed for pensions providers to meet the deadline of August 31 to connect to the central computer system of the “pensions dashboard programme”. – The Times

US close

Wall Street stocks closed higher on Thursday following comments from the Atlanta Federal Reserve's Raphael Bostic, even as Treasury yields remained elevated.

At the close, Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 1.05% at 33,003.57, while the S&P 500 advanced 0.76% to 3,981.35 and the Nasdaq Composite saw out the session 0.73% firmer at 11,462.98.

The Dow closed 341.73 points higher on Thursday, extending yesterday's very modest gains.

Market participants were zeroed in on rates at the open, with the benchmark 10-year note trading at 4.062% and the 2-year note reaching 4.904%. Both the rise in bond yields and fears of a potentially larger-than-expected interest rate hike from the Federal Reserve had weighed on the early 2023 rally over the last few days.

Sentiment got a boost after Atlanta Fed president Raphael Bostic stated he believes policymaker's can keep interest rate hikes to 25 basis points rather than the half-point increase preferred by other officials.