London afternoon: Bid talk enlivens subdued session

Leading shares remain moderately firmer on balance, but with the US markets closed and with a paucity of corporate news in the UK to get the juices flowing, trading is subdued.Telecoms group Cable & Wireless Worldwide is the best performer on a weekend report Singapore Telecom is eyeing up the telephony group. Bid speculation is also buoying Home Retail, the Homebase and Argos owner. Seymour Pierce has upgraded the stock from "sell" to "hold" ahead of the retailer's results this week. The company "has a relatively strong balance sheet with cash forecast at £320m by end of March 2011, even after a share buyback of £150m, and strong cashflow, which would be attractive to a predator," the broker reckons.BP is also higher. The leaking Gulf of Mexico well is now secured according to a US report, while it has resurrected plans to sell its stake in Prudhoe Bay in Alaska to help pay for the costs of cleaning up the spill.GlaxoSmithKline is a little off colour though. It is facing a call to withdraw its diabetes drug Avandia in Britain because of heart risk concerns. UK regulator, the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), says the risks of Avandia, known generically as rosiglitazone, outweighed its benefits and that "it no longer has a place on the UK market". Barclays is also in retreat after Evolution Securities cut its price target by around one-eighth to 298p, saying it is one of the few banking stocks it covers for which it sees downside potential.British Airways chief executive Willie Walsh has held talks with executives of merger partner Iberia about BA's role as a consolidator in the airline industry and though no names were mentioned analysts suggest Qantas, Cathay Pacific, American, LAN and South African are all possible targets.Elsewhere in aviation, no-frills airline easyJet is a high flyer after saying load factor in August 2010 was 92.3%, up from 91.8% in August of last year. The number of passengers carried increased by 8.4% to 5.2m from 4.8m a year earlier. Fenner, the industrial conveyor belt maker, has motored ahead after saying it expects results for the year to 31 August 2010 to be at the top end of market expectations. The trading environment for its conveyor belting operations in the mining sector remains strong, while the Advanced Engineered Products division has returned to historic margin run rates with improvements across the spectrum of operations, the company said.Oil and gas exploration company Chariot has wheeled out an increase to its resource estimate for its Namibian assets. A further 1.5bn barrels of unrisked prospective resources have been identified, meaning the total gross resource volume now stands at more than 10bn barrels.Blue-collar recruitment and training specialist Staffline reported a 70% surge in half year profit, hiked its dividend and expects full year results to come in significantly ahead of current expectations.Another company expecting a good second half is recycling containers maker Straight after first half reported profit dipped to £0.85m from £0.95m the year before. The interim dividend has been increased to 1.35p from 1.3p.Titan Europe, the manufacturer of wheels and undercarriage track assemblies for off-highway vehicles, has seen an uplift in trading but it is still not out of the red. Adjusted results, which exclude exceptional items and the effect of currency movements, showed a loss before tax of £0.72m in the first half of 2010 versus a loss of £1.13m the year before, on revenue that increased to £166.9m from £164.7m.Heavy snow from January through to March hit five-a-side soccer specialist Goals Soccer Centres' first half, but excluding the snow impact like for like sales were flat.