Investor interest pushes bank stocks higher

Increased interest from investors has helped push mining and banking stocks higher in morning trading on the FTSE 100 today (January 25th).

HSBC, Barclays, Standard Chartered, Royal Bank of Scotland and Lloyds Banking Group were up by as much as 3.5 per cent at 09:26 GMT, Reuters reports.

Gains of between 0.5 per cent and 1.1 per cent were seen by Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, Kazakhmys, Lonmin, Xstrata and Anglo American as investors sought to purchase shares at lower prices following the declines that have occurred recently.

’We have seen investors come in this morning to pick equities up from their lows on hopes that the last two weeks worth of losses were overdone,’ remarked Joshua Raymond, market strategist at City Index.

However, the increases failed to help the FTSE record a substantial rise, with the index increasing by 5.5 points to 5,308.49 points, having ended 0.6 per cent lower on Friday.ADNFCR-2318-ID-19575387-ADNFCR