London's flat week: the FTSE 100 ended 1.29 points higher

The FTSE 100 closed on Friday at 10,817.85, up 25.31 points on the day and 1.29 points on the week. That is a gain of 0.01% across five sessions — a flatline so precise it reads like a rounding error rather than a market.

It was not a quiet week. Inside that one-point move sat a six-session winning streak running into Wednesday, a 0.8% slump on Thursday that was London's steepest one-day fall in roughly six weeks, and a Friday rebound that clawed most of it back. The FTSE 250 fared marginally better, closing Friday at 24,957.78, up 0.24% on the day.

What the flat line really records is a week in which almost nothing that moved London was British. Our Monday note opened on Iranian sanctions and an oil price; by Friday the market was waiting on a Federal Reserve chair speaking in Wyoming. In between, the single biggest domestic story was a legal outcome in a California courthouse.

How the week unfolded

The sentiment we logged each morning traces the arc exactly: Cautious on Monday, Mixed on Tuesday, Risk-on by Wednesday, back to Mixed on Thursday and Cautious again on Friday. Like the index, the mood round-tripped.

Monday's note flagged one dated catalyst: US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent unveiling what he had billed as the "toughest sanctions in history" against Iran at 7pm UK time. Brent stood at $93.16 a barrel when we wrote, already down 1.3% as traders booked profits ahead of the announcement. The sanctions landed — and oil kept falling. By Tuesday the market had judged them unlikely to disrupt physical supply in the near term; by Wednesday Brent was down 2.6% to around $86.20 as talks between Iran and Oman raised hopes of easing pressure on the Strait of Hormuz. Brent was near $88 by Friday. The geopolitical catalyst we flagged as the week's main event resolved by deflating.

Tuesday's note flagged two more: Prudential's half-year results on Wednesday, where we noted new business profit was expected to grow around 10-11%, and Nvidia's second quarter after Wednesday's US close.

Prudential came in a little under that. New business profit rose 8% to $1.4bn — 10% excluding mainland China — with the new business margin two points wider at 40%. The insurer lifted its first interim dividend 15% and reported adjusted operating profit after tax up 17% per share. The headline figure fell short of the range our note implied, but the release was read as reassuring rather than disappointing, with analysts framing it as relief that full-year targets had been reaffirmed.

Nvidia did not fall short. It beat on revenue and earnings, guided to 70% revenue growth for its 2028 fiscal year and warned that shortages of advanced memory chips would persist through the same period. Its shares rose 8.7%, the Nasdaq Composite added 1.6% and South Korea's Kospi jumped 2.76% at Thursday's open. For London the effect was atmospheric rather than direct, and Thursday's note said as much: the index opened with the read-through from Wall Street's rally abroad set against sticky gilt yields at home.

The gilt side won that day. The 10-year yield had reached 4.99% on Wednesday, close to a multi-month high, and Thursday's 0.8% fall was driven by banks and energy names rather than by anything to do with chips. Friday's note then recorded a turn we had not flagged in advance: gilt yields slid on bets that the Bank of England's next rate rise has moved into 2027.

The last flagged catalyst arrived inside London's own session. Fed chair Kevin Warsh gave his first Jackson Hole keynote at 3pm BST, calling underlying inflation trends "concerning" and defending his practice of giving investors less explicit forward guidance — "we should not indulge a regime in which market participants are looking primarily to the Fed for their next trade". Short-dated Treasury yields rose on the mildly hawkish reading. The FTSE 100 had been as high as 10,844.99 earlier in the session and finished 27 points below that.

The names that moved it

Melrose Industries was the week's genuine UK story, and the only name we led with twice. On Wednesday the Orange County District Attorney's Office closed its criminal investigation into May's chemical incident at the GKN Aerospace plant in Garden Grove, California without bringing charges, and shares jumped by as much as 9%. On Friday the group put numbers to the aftermath, unveiling a claims programme of up to $100m (£73.4m) for residents and businesses caught by the evacuation order, and targeting 28 September for a full restart of manufacturing at the site. Shares stood at 516.8p on Friday morning against roughly 470p before the probe news broke — close to a tenth added in three sessions, on the removal of a legal overhang rather than on anything to do with trading.

Miners were the week's engine and the most persistent thread through our notes, named on Monday, Tuesday and Friday. Endeavour Mining was the standout at both ends, leading blue-chip gainers with a 5.3% jump on Tuesday and rising 3.1% to 4,884p on Friday. Fresnillo added 2.2% to 3,241p on Friday with gold close to $4,600 an ounce, having been near $4,646 when we wrote on Monday. Antofagasta, Anglo American and Rio Tinto all contributed on Tuesday, when Antofagasta added 2%, Anglo rose 1.5% and Rio gained 0.4%.

The offset was energy. Shell and BP appear in three of the five notes and always on the losing side: down 0.3% and 1.2% respectively on Tuesday, lower again on Wednesday, and both off more than 1% on Thursday as crude fell for a fourth straight session. Over the week Brent went from $93.16 to roughly $88, and London's two oil majors tracked it down.

AstraZeneca opened the week as the single biggest drag on the index, down about 1% on Monday and a further 0.8% on Tuesday, with GSK off 0.5% alongside it. Neither featured in our notes again after Tuesday.

One mid-week casualty is worth recording because it was contradicted within a day. Sage Group fell 3.85% on Wednesday after a cautious outlook from the US software peer Intuit revived the worry that artificial intelligence is eating into enterprise software budgets. Nvidia's numbers that same night cut the other way on precisely that argument. The two sat a few hours apart and pointed in opposite directions, which is a fair measure of how thin the evidence base for that debate still is.

What to watch next week

The London Stock Exchange is closed on Monday 31 August for the summer bank holiday, making the coming week a four-session one.

Nothing in this week's notes flagged a dated UK results release or a Bank of England decision for the days ahead. The corporate diary was described as thin from Monday morning onwards, with the summer lull still in place, and the Office for National Statistics continues its regular real-time economic activity publications. Melrose's own dated marker sits further out: 28 September, its target for resuming full manufacturing at Garden Grove. Current levels for the names above are on our screener.