NZ stocks: Tower soars on moribund market

12.00pm

Tower was an early star performer on a moribund sharemarket this morning, as a brokerage tried to snare 5 per cent of the company.

Brokerage JB Were has so far snapped up 3.5 per cent of the financial services company, which is regarded as a takeover target since its stock slumped around 55 per cent on a profit warning.

Today it shot up 25c to 205 and topped both turnover by volume and value on 6.7 million shares worth $13.8 million.

Speculation swirled about the mystery buyer. GPG was one possible candidate and its shares rose a cent to 152.

Interest in Tower was not enough to get the NZSE-40 capital index out of negative territory -- just after 11am it was trading down 6.18 points to 1924.72 on turnover worth $31.8 million, mirroring a slump on Wall St.

Brokers said the market was being driven purely by order flow as the Christmas break approached.

``We're getting the feeling out of the US with war drums beating that everyone's more than happy to stay on the sidelines,'' said Sam Macdonald of Direct Broking.

One of the few other stocks to see much activity was Telecom, down 5c to 458 on $10.9 million.

Earlier the stock was up a cent, and Mr Macdonald said Telecom was seeing ``a bit of book-squaring''.

``I think it will just continue to go up over the Christmas break.''

He said people who had bought Telecom shares at $4.50 when the Verizon stake was sold had been able to sell their stock to lower levels, as the New Zealand currency strengthened.

``Once it got through $4.50, people panicked and sold it off for no apparent reason at all, and it's bounced back purely because of that. And I think it will continue.''

He picked NZ Oil & Gas as a stock for next year, as investors jumped into the company following an unexplained sell off overnight.

The stock jumped 3c or 9 per cent initially but eased back slightly to being up 2c at 35. The company is due to start drilling offshore for oil in February.

Other moves, often on low volume, included Air NZ, down 2c to 50; Goodman Fielder down 2c to 194; Auckland Airport up 4c to 535; Briscoe up 5c to 275; Pacific Retail up 4c to 284, and the Warehouse down 4c to 706.

So far there have been 23 rises and 31 falls on 105 stocks traded.

On Wall St, war jitters outweighed a better than expected second quarter result from the world's number two software company, Oracle.

The Dow Jones industrial average closed down 82.55 points, or 0.98 per cent, at 8,364.80. The broader Standard & Poor's 500 index declined 6.85 points, or 0.77 per cent, at 884.27, while the technology-laced Nasdaq composite index fell 7.28 points, or 0.53 per cent, at 1,354.23.

- NZPA