Primary Health Properties buys Townside centre, Mattioli Woods acquires Richings

London open

The FTSE 100 was expected to open flat on Friday, having closed down 0.35% at 7,124.98 on Thursday.

Stocks to watch

Mattioli Woods has bought financial planning and wealth management business Richings from its shareholders for up to £1.8m. The AIM-listed wealth manager said on Friday that it will pay an initial £0.9m and a potential further £0.9m dependent on the attainment of specified performance targets in the two years after completion. Founded in 1991, Richings works with more than 270 private client families with around £70m of assets under advice.

Primary Health Properties on Friday said it had bought the Townside Primary Care Centre and adjacent office building in Bury, Lancashire for £40m. The centre is a purpose-built primary care hub which is fully let to NHS Property Services and a pharmacy. The office accommodation is also fully let with 90% of the income secured against Bury Council. PHP said the combined weighted average unexpired lease term for the two adjacent buildings is 10.8 years with 91% of the contracted rent secured against government backed tenants.

Newspaper round-up

Warrington council lent the billionaire owner of The Hut Group (THG) £151m after the online retailer’s £5bn market listing. The Cheshire local authority extended a £200m loan facility to a company controlled by Matt Moulding in October, one of the largest council loans on record, from which it has taken three drawdowns totalling more than £151m. – Guardian

Pay for HGV drivers jumped by more than a tenth in just five months as the industry struggles with severe worker shortages that are straining Britain’s supply chains. The “staggering” rise from February to July, shown in figures from jobs site Indeed, is almost double the rate of increase across all driving jobs. The increase is more than 13 times the 0.8pc average rise across all jobs during the period. – Telegraph

Reinsurance giant Swiss Re has agreed to pay $10m (£7.3m) to reduce its carbon footprint by sucking CO2 out of the air in what the company says is the first deal of its kind. The 10-year contract with Switzerland's direct-air-capture (DAC) start-up Climeworks will help Swiss Re achieve its goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2030, the company said. - Telegraph

Peer-to-peer lenders have been told to improve contingency plans for winding down their services or they will be banned from writing new loans. The intervention by the City regulator comes after a series of chaotic collapses in the sector that have led to the loss of tens of millions of pounds of retail investors’ money. – The Times

A new pay package worth up to £100 million in shares for the incoming chief executive of Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group has received a mixed reaction from shareholders and company remuneration advisers. Michael Murray, 31, who is the fiancé of Ashley’s daughter, is set to receive the award if the retailer’s shares achieve a target price of £15 for 30 consecutive trading days before October 7, 2025. Murray would receive a base salary of £1 million a year. – The Times

US close

Wall Street stocks were in the red at the closing bell Thursday, as the Federal Reserve's two-day summit in Wyoming kicked off.

At the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 0.54% at 35,213.12, as the S&P 500 lost 0.58% to 4,470.00 and the Nasdaq Composite was off 0.64% at 14,945.81.

The Dow closed 192.38 points lower on Thursday, reversing some of the gains recorded in the previous session.

Thursday's primary focus was the Federal Reserve's much-anticipated Jackson Hole symposium, with investors holding out to see if Fed heads provide some sort of update on their plans regarding tapering monetary stimulus at the meeting’s conclusion on Friday.

On the macro front, the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits rose a little more than expected last week but remained near a pandemic low, according to figures released by the Labor Department.