Furious traders were left twiddling their thumbs for the last 40 minutes of trading yesterday after the London Stock Exchange’s IT system collapsed.

The LSE emphasised that the trading system itself was not down but only the Infolect system that disseminates data to the market. However, the effect was that traders would have to wait until this morning to ask clients whether they want to settle trades, since stock prices were uncertain.

One trader said: “I’ve not known this to happen since the start of electronic trading. If they’re saying trading is still going on, that’s just not true.”

The usual closing auction at 4.30pm was delayed until 6pm and the FTSE 100 index had to be recalculated. Instead of trading up more than 50 points, as screens had been showing since 3.50pm when trading stopped, it had in fact slipped by 89.8 points to 6,385.1.

All prices that follow will have to come with a health warning.

Financial and commercial property stocks were behind the FTSE 100’s fall. Capital One, the American credit card lender, upset Wall Street and ripples of fear spread to UK traders after it raised its bad-debt write-off estimate for next year from $4.9 billion to up to $5.5 billion. Analysts said that this was a poor sign for the future of the US housing market.

Fears that Old Mutual’s figures today will be hit by the weak US dollar and rand caused the UK and South African insurer with a US fund management arm to fall 19.8p to 155p.

Goldman Sachs reiterated its “sell” advice on Liberty International, the shopping centre developer, after results on Tuesday; it closed down 109p at £10.10. Fellow property stocks also took big hits. British Landwas off 47p at 956p and Land Securities was down 71p at £14.79.

Barclays, off 13p at 511p, and Royal Bank of Scotland, down 17½p at 438p, were both under attack from shorters over fears about mortgage-derivative write-offs. Antony Broadbent, an analyst with Sanford Bernstein, said that Barclays may have to write off £1.6 billion and RBS £500 million.

British Energy was off 40½p at 514½p as it gave warning of another technical problem at its reactors, which analysts say could keep them shut for months. This helped Drax, the coal-fired station, to jump 18½p to 718p on the expectation ofhigh retail energy prices this winter.

ITV closed down 2.4p at a record low of 93.4p over fears that regulators may make BSkyB, down 12½p to 620p, a forced seller of its ITV stake. Punch Taverns was off 16p at 903p on talk that its Spirit managed pubs arm would unveil a big earnings fall today.

QXL Ricardo, the online auctioneer, was the top mid-cap performer, up 230p to £17.40, as it revealed a bid approach, speculated to be from eBay.

— New York: Shares fell sharply after the dollar sank further amid speculation that China will seek to diversify some of its foreign currency stockpiles beyond the greenback. The Dow Jones industrial average closed down 360.90 points at 13,300.

Owing to the technical difficulties at the London Stock Exchange, all share prices quoted today are indicative

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