What do gold, sugar, casualty insurance and government contracts have in common? The answer is that generally speaking, you can count on them in a recession. So perhaps it is no surprise that Randgold Resources, Tate & Lyle, Amlin, the Lloyd’s insurer, and Serco, the public sector outsourcer, all look poised to enter the FTSE 100 index at the quarterly reshuffle next month.

Randgold, up 208p to £25.16, is much admired because its productive mine in Mali, has potential for expansion. Even when that is depleted the miner has an as yet untapped discovery in Senegal.

By contrast Fresnillo, the recently floated Mexican silver and gold miner, up with the rest of the sector by 13.1p to 148.1p, is almost certain to fall out of the FTSE 100.

Its shares have collapsed from a high of 555p in May, since its mines are mature and it has yet to find replacements. Tate & Lyle lost 5¼p to 372½p, Amlin fell 9¾p to 354¾p and Serco gained 13p to 374p.

Two oil services companies, John Wood Group, up 5p at 211¼p, and Petrofac, up ¼p at 336¾p, as well as Stagecoach, up 11p at 169.6p, at current valuations of about £1 billion are likely to drop out of the blue-chip index. If Home Retail Group, the owner of Argos and Homebase, up 13p to 197p, manages to squeeze into the top league, it may replace Invensys, the rail signalling engineer, up 10.1p to 156.8p.

The FTSE 100 closed up 73.41 to 4,226.1 on thin volume as Wall Street was closed for Thanksgiving.

Miners were once again the top performers, with heavily shorted Xstrata up 104½p to 959p and Kazakhmys, the copper miner, gaining 28p to 269p. Metals prices have been helped by the weakening dollar.

In the FTSE 250, BlueBay Asset Management dived 30p to 70p on a profit warning as it said that it would have to close one of its key funds, triggered, it is understood, by a flood of redemptions.

TUI Travel was up 5¼p to 205¼p after it said that it was setting up a board committee to examine a possible bid from its German parent company. Traders believe that this is a strong hint that a bid will happen in April when the parent’s lockout expires. It has plenty of cash from its disposal of Hapag-Lloyd.

Housebuilders were helped by Nationwide’s November house price survey, which showed a smaller than expected drop.

Taylor Wimpeygained 4.22p to 10p on rising hopes that it will agree a debt for equity swap with its bankers. However, analysts doubt that much value will be left for existing investors.

Barratt Developmentsgained 5p to 50p and Bovis Homes rose 10¼p to 312p. But Redrow went against the trend, losing 7½p to 197½p as KBC Peel Hunt said that it had risen too far compared with its better run peers.

Market talk has Pendragon, up 0.03p to 4½p, meeting key investors next week to discuss bringing down its debt pile and to warn them that they could be substantially diluted by a debt for equity swap with banks.

Panmure Gordon said: “Given its most recent profit warning . . . it looks like this is the only option for the company.”

New York: Markets in the US were closed for Thanksgiving.

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