Computacenter and Redcentric rise as investors buy up tech shares

They may be the guys in old band T-shirts shoved in a basement office, but the IT crowd were in vogue in the City today.

Tech specialists have been in demand as companies get a handle the surge in working from home, and Computacenter has been on a tear as a result. The group offers services including cloud computing and counts William Hill and Transport for London as a clients.

Today it set the FTSE 250 mid-cap index alight, up 209p or 10% at 2225p, as it told investors its trading had been strong and that profits were like to be “materially above the board’s expectations”.

Investors in the sector also had a takeover to get their teeth into. AIM-listed Redcentric helps small businesses build up their telecoms networks said it was in talks with the UK arm of Australia’s Macquarie Principal Finance and cloud services specialist Six Degrees about selling up.

The company said the sale process, aided by adviser Stifel, will conclude before the end of the year and it may still instead focus on organic growth or its own acquisitions. The shares notched up a 2% gain at 145p. In June, Redcentric paid £11.4 million in compensation after a Financial Conduct Authority probe found it made false and misleading statements in 2016.

Investors appeared in buoyant mood, with the FTSE 100 wiping out yesterday’s losses — up 1.7% at 5,959.32 as out-of-favour stocks were given a second chance. ITV, now relegated from the FTSE 100, rose 5% to 60p while Rolls-Royce — which hit a 16-year low yesterday amid frets over its expected share placing — increased 6% to 219p.

“After a brutal couple of sessions, the FTSE 100 has bounced back with investors flocking to a mixture of companies offering strong growth prospects such as Aveva as well as ones that have been beaten up and look cheap relative to history including ITV,” said Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell.

Traders tucked into Domino’s Pizza on signs that its management merry-go-round may have settled. Under new boss Dominic Paul, the former Costa Coffee chief, interim finance chief Neil Smith has been handed the gig permanently.

Meanwhile it has added Taco Bell finance boss Natalia Barsegiyan to its board, as well as Lynn Fordham, managing partner at private equity firm Larchpoint Capital. The shares rose 3% to 343p.

Small-cap spotlight

Car dealership Cambria was in the fast lane today, as investors welcomed cost-cutting at the motor dealership group. The company has been on a concerted push into high-end cars —selling Jaguars in Barnet and Aston Martins in Brentwood — over the past couple of years in a hunt for higher margins.