Kaffs posted:squiggle posted:Just as an aside....
As predicted the FTSE 100 is now ABOVE its pre-referendum high...Armageddon postponed again...please check back again tomorrow!
Currency's got a way to go yet
We have to be careful about this FTSE 100 "recovery". Two-thirds of FTSE 100 stocks are still below last Thursday's position; one-third are more than 10% down and one-seventh (i.e. around 14 companies) are more than 20% down.
Today's increase is almost entirely down to a very small number of very large companies such as Shell, BP, BAT, Diageo, AstraZeneca, and GlaxoSmithKline. Significantly the FTSE 250 is still way down on Thursday: basically, the smaller you are, the more you've been hit.
Also - as Garage Joe and EC have pointed out - in the initial panic, a lot of people seemed to forget that we haven't actually left the EU yet: and won't officially for some time yet. That belated realisation has allowed time for the market to stabilize.
As I said on another thread a while back, the Brexit fallout "will go on for years". Short term market fluctuations don't mean a lot either way. Rapid stock market rises are halted by traders cashing in; rapid stock market falls are halted by traders taking the opportunity to buy stocks cheap. It looks like the latter is what happened today: basically the city traders went bargain-hunting. 
It reminds me of the Dot-Com crash some years ago. Initially all tech stocks were hit badly, but then some clever traders realised that many of these companies weren't affected by the bubble at all, and were therefore able to buy up stable and valuable stocks such as IBM cheaply. I think that's what's happening here: the realisation that all stocks aren't equal. Those companies that aren't affected much by the EU and/or are big enough not to care are recovering, but smaller companies still need to be concerned.