The FTSE 100 was broadly flat on Thursday with storming global equity markets looking set for a day of reflection as investors balance hopes of interest rate cuts with slowing growth.

London’s leading index was trading lower by 6 points at the time of writing.

Markets are likely to trade headline to headline for the foreseeable future as investors weigh the potential benefits of interest rate cuts in the US and UK against the root cause of any rate cuts, that being spluttering US and UK economies.

Indeed, the UK released GDP figures on Thursday for the second quarter that showed the rate of growth slowing, albeit at a better rate than economists had predicted.

“Investors appear to be reassessing the path of interest rate cuts in the UK, after the economy snapped back to growth,” said Susannah Streeter, head of money and markets, Hargreaves Lansdown.

The steady session for UK stocks followed another robust session in the US overnight, where the S&P 500 closed at another record high.

“Markets also drew impetus from the political front as US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent made an unusually direct call for a 50 bps rate cut at the next FOMC meeting, an intervention in monetary policy but being normalised somewhat,” said Ahmad Assiri Research Strategist at Pepperstone.

FTSE 100 movers

In the UK, investors were picking through mixed FTSE 100 corporate updates. Aviva and Admirial shares jumped on strong updates, while there was a more cautious reaction to an update from copper miner Antofagasta.

Admiral was the FTSE 100’s top gainer after increasing its dividend following a strong half year period. Admirial shares rose 5% as the group revealed profits soared a bumper 69%.

“In a competitive market, Admiral remains in the fast lane. The strength of its brand allows it to remain disciplined on price while still attracting new business. Admiral’s smart pricing tools have also helped to support underwriting profitability over time,” said AJ Bell investment director Russ Mould.

“The company is being rewarded for treating customers relatively well, at least in relation to its rivals, including during the pandemic. This is driving customer loyalty.”

Investors were also impressed by Aviva’s 30% increase in pretax profit for the first half and shares rose 3%.

Natural resources stocks were the biggest drag on the FTSE 100, with oil and copper notable commodities to drop overnight. BP shares were among the fallers again as hopes around the Ukraine conflict sent oil lower.

Antofagasta was flat despite reporting a 60% increase in EBITDA.

“Chilean copper miner Antofagasta has already enjoyed a strong run for its share price, which explains the relatively muted reaction to today’s solid first-half numbers,” Mould said.

“The company is benefiting not just from a robust pricing environment for copper but also from improved operational performance and increased production.”

MicroSalt is poised for a rally, with shares trading near key support levels following a recent pullback sparked by confusion surrounding announcements regarding related-party payments to their founding company, Tekcapital.

The sell-off appears to be an overreaction to confirmatory announcements that have no bearing on the long-term growth story.

Shares in the low-sodium salt technology company are now down over 30% year-to-date on little more than what appears to be a minor transgression regarding the disclosure of repayments relating to convertible notes that provided MicroSalt with growth capital in the early stage of its growth story.

Looking beyond the recent announcements, MicroSalt is set for a record year of revenues driven by the adoption of its technology by some of the world’s largest snack food companies.

MicroSalt’s investment case is underpinned by a global trend to reduce sodium in food products to help combat cardiovascular diseases exacerbated by the overconsumption of salt.

We do not know the names of the food giants choosing to lower sodium in their foods using MicroSalt due to commercial sensitivities, but we do know they are ramping up their orders.

MicroSalt issued an update earlier this year revealing orders for their bulk product in Q1 totalled 142% of total revenue for 2024.

Orders totalled 98mt in Q1, roughly enough salt to manufacture 280,000,000 packets of ready salted crisps (assuming 0.35g sodium per pack), or 13,000,000 loaves of bread.

These are serious orders from firms that have invested considerable time in testing before deploying MicroSalt in their products at scale – whether these nameless products are crisps, bread, or even breakfast cereals.

Given the sheer size of the orders, MicroSalt had the confidence to issue revenue guidance of at least $2,500,000 for the full year.

This is before accounting for any contribution from a news product designed for French fries, which is due to launch in the second half of the year.

From a technical analysis perspective, MicroSalt has bounced off the 50p level – a region it has previously found support.

NVIDIA has announced new libraries and models designed to accelerate the building and deployment of industrial AI and robotics simulation applications.

NVIDIA has launched new Omniverse software development kits and NuRec libraries that introduce RTX ray-traced 3D Gaussian splatting technology.

This breakthrough rendering technique enables developers to capture, reconstruct and simulate real-world environments in 3D using sensor data.

The technology is already integrated into CARLA simulator used by over 150,000 developers, whilst autonomous vehicle leader Foretellix is incorporating NuRec alongside Sensor RTX and Cosmos Transfer for physically accurate synthetic data generation.

NVIDIA DGX Cloud, now available on Microsoft Azure Marketplace, offers developers a fully managed platform for streaming OpenUSD and RTX-based applications at scale from the cloud, significantly reducing infrastructure management complexity whilst enabling global access to advanced simulation capabilities.

NVIDIA outlined how major industry leaders are rapidly adopting these technologies for real-world physical AI applications.

Amazon Devices & Services is deploying the platform for manufacturing solutions, whilst Boston Dynamics, Figure AI, and Skild AI are leveraging Omniverse libraries and Isaac Sim to accelerate robotics development.

Magna is integrating Cosmos Reason into its autonomous City Delivery platform, and companies like Lightwheel, Moon Surgical, and Uber are utilising the technology for physical AI training and data annotation at scale.

“Computer graphics and AI are converging to fundamentally transform robotics,” said Rev Lebaredian, vice president of Omniverse and simulation technologies at NVIDIA.

“By combining AI reasoning with scalable, physically accurate simulation, we’re enabling developers to build tomorrow’s robots and autonomous vehicles that will transform trillions of dollars in industries.”

FTSE 100 was clinging on to gains on Wednesday as several poor corporate updates offset a wider improvement in investor sentiment.

Negative reactions to earnings updates from Persimmon and Beazley moderated the FTSE 100’s gains after US equities touched fresh record highs overnight.

Investors have been buoyed by yesterday’s US inflation reading, which came in line with economists’ estimates and paved the way for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates in September.

The absence of any material impact on inflation from Donald Trump’s tariffs means that the Federal Reserve will likely act to stem the slowdown in the US labour market.

Equity bulls jumped on the prospect of lower borrowing costs, and the S&P 500 recorded yet another all-time high overnight.

“Global equities continue to ride this out and keep going. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq made record highs as the cooler-than-expected July inflation print buoyed risk sentiment,” said Saxo UK Investor Strategist, Neil Wilson.

“The S&P 500 climbed 1.1% and the Nasdaq rallied 1.4%, while the small cap Russell 2k rallied 3% because lower-quality stocks do well when rates fall. The MSCI All Country World Index also made an all-time high.”

The impact of the interest rate cut hopes helped the FTSE 100 rise by 0.2% in mid-morning trading. The gains were broad with 68 of the 100 constituents trading higher at the time of writing.

AstraZeneca did a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of the number of points added to the index with a 1.8% gain.

Miners enjoyed the risk-on sentiment, and Antofagasta added over 1% as Glencore and Rio Tinto made smaller increases.

Beazley was the top faller after slashing its outlook on rising geopolitical and climate change risks. Shares were down 8% at the time of writing.

Persimmon shares slipped 2% despite issuing a relatively positive half-year report with completions increasing 4% over the period. One-off charges were the main detractor on results day as the company’s earnings fell due to costs related to a CMA investigation.

“Results from Persimmon suggest the UK housebuilding sector is not a total lemon, and at their current low ebb, these stocks might pique the interest of contrarian, value investors,” said Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell.

“However under the bonnet things don’t look quite so rosy, thanks to some rather chunky exceptional items which mean earnings per share is actually down by 10%. Seven housebuilders have agreed to pay £100 million into affordable housing programmes following a CMA investigation into price collusion, and Persimmon’s contribution adds up to a £15.2 million hit to its income statement.”

BP was also among the top fallers as oil prices slipped ahead of crucial talks between Trump and Putin on the Ukraine war this Friday.

“Oil markets look to have assumed that a resolution of the war in Ukraine is done and dusted, before either the US or Russian leaders set foot on Alaskan soil. Brent futures contracts are continuing to slip lower, dropping through $66 in early morning trade today,” explained Steve Clayton, head of equity funds, Hargreaves Lansdown.