Britain's blue chips continued their charge at the week's close - ending up over 114 points at 6,310 - putting the lid on a volatile trading week, which has seen stocks sink and investor fear rear its ugly head once more.
At the time of writing, the rally was also in full swing across the pond, withn Dow Jones up 288 points and Nasdaq 66 points higher.
Earlier London shares started on the road to recovery, buoyed by US Fed comments yesterday, which suggested that the end of economic stimulus measures could be delayed. The revival today came after a whopping slump of over 3% of the UK index over the last two days.
Buoying shares in afternoon trade was a report stateside, which showed US housing starts rose 6.3% in September following a 12.8% drop the month before better than expected consumer confidence data.
Oil stocks were doing well as the price of crude came up a little, with Tullow (LON:TUL) services provider Petrofac both risers - with Tullow the biggest gainer on the day in the City.
Meanwhile, the biggest laggard was Rolls Royce Holdings (LON:RR.), which slumped almost 12% as the global engineer moved into reverse after the company lowered revenue guidance.
The power systems developer said economic conditions have deteriorated in the last few months while Russian trade sanctions have tightened up, prompting some customers to delay or cancel orders.
Rolls-Royce said the trend is particularly evident in its Nuclear & Energy and Power Systems businesses.
The company had previously indicated to the City that 2014 revenues would be little changed from 2013, but it now expects the top line to head 3.5% to 4% lower, excluding the effect of foreign exchange movements.
Big news today was also another float pull as Richard Branson’s Virgin Money postponed its planned £2bn stock market float due to the slide in stock markets over the past two weeks.
It's the second so-called 'challenger bank' to cancel a listing this week after Aldermore, which had aimed to raised £300mln, dropped its plans blaming the market turmoil.
Virgin Money also blamed the volatility of stock markets currently for its decision. Jayne-Anne Gadhia, chief executive, said the bank still intended to press ahead with a listing “as soon as market conditions allow".
Junior oil stocks also gained today along with bigger cousins. Leni Gas & Oil (LON:LGO) continued its ascent, to move up 37.4% while closely followed AIM firm GKP (LON:GKP) added 13.11% to its share value.
Aminex (LON:AEX) shares rose over 14% as it revealed two long serving non-exec directors of Aminex (LON:AEX) are set to retire from the board.
The retirement of Derek Tughan and David Hooker will take immediate effect, the company told investors, and the role of another existing Aminex director Andrew Hay will be stepped up to senior non-executive.
Oklahoma’s Mississippi Lime play is well suited to the current environment of lower crude oil prices, says Magnolia Petroleum’s (LON:MAGP) Rita Whittington, who saw shares in the firm rise nearly 7% on the day.
Whittington, Magnolia’s chief operating officer, highlights that the Mississippi Lime has a number of favourable characteristics amid lower oil prices – including relatively cheap drilling costs, less tight geology, strong flow rates (in new wells) and the ‘liquids rich’ nature of the play.
Magnolia’s cost to produce is very low, less than US$30 per barrel, she says.
“Like all oil companies, we would prefer to see higher oil prices, but even with pressure on the oil price Magnolia's margins are very healthy,” Whittington said in a statement.
Elsewhere, ANGLE’s (LON:AGL) shares rose 5% as its Parsortix cancer cell capture device has received good reports from four institutions leading research into the treatment of the disease.
Cancer Research UK Manchester (CRUK), the Medical University of Vienna (Vienna) orally, and poster presentations from The University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) and Barts Cancer Institute (Barts) all reported key strengths of the Parsortix system compared with other systems at a circulating tumour cell symposium in Crete.
Elsewhere, initial positive findings of a clinical study into Tissue Regenix’s (LON:TRX) wound care treatment Dermapure will be presented at the symposium on advanced wound care (SAWC) in Las Vegas tomorrow (October 18).
The study has been conducted by the University Hospital of South Manchester NHS Foundation Trust and involved a series of six-week trials on 50 healthy human patients to compare it to "normal" wound healing techniques.
Early findings suggest the use of Dermapure has resulted in increased growth of new blood vessels to aid wound care and improved cellular level healing compared to the control sample. Shares rose over 7% in London.