A heavy dose of earnings from financial companies, including insurers Prudential and Aviva will be scanned this week for signs the sector has turned the corner, as Britain's top shares continue to rise.
Banks - the FTSE's biggest constituency - will also remain in the spotlight, with mortgage lenders Abbey National and HBOS continuing the sector's reporting season.
And as results from all corners of the market continue to pour in, figures from mining firms Xstrata and Anglo American are expected to show the benefits of increased demand for commodities as the economy improves.
Blue-chip shares have risen three weeks in a row, putting on a late spurt to reach 19-month highs on Friday, as corporate results largely pleased investors and as insurer Standard Life said it had finished selling 7.5 billion pounds of equities.
By Friday's mid-session the FTSE-100 was up 16.5 points at 4531.7 - having earlier touched its best level since July 2002.
"If you look at the charts it's a combination of very steady week by week progress and extended periods of quite narrow range trading," said Andrew Bell, European equity strategist at Carr Sheppards Crosthwaite.
"The underlying bias of the markets is to go stronger but based on growing profits and better news on economic growth."
Although British shares have made steady progress, Standard Life's forced selling of stocks and disappointing results from heavyweight oil firm Shell and drugs giant GlaxoSmithKline have left the FTSE under-performing the heady rise of its European and US counterparts.
Market watchers said the FTSE's heavy weighting towards under-performing oils and pharmaceuticals stocks and scarcity of recovery plays, such as technology and industrial companies, may continue to whittle down the FTSE's rise.
"The UK is a defensive market and this has held things back a bit but we are still well placed for higher single digit growth this year," said Bob Semple, UK equity strategist at Deutsche Bank.
Semple said he expected mid-caps to continue to perform better than blue chips, given the mid-cap index's greater number of technology and cyclical stocks.
Mid-cap companies slated to report numbers this week include recruitment company Michael Page, house-builders Wilson Bowden and Wimpey and Colt Telecom.
Elsewhere Internet bank Egg reports results on Monday. But all eyes will be on parent company Prudential -which reports annual figures on Tuesday - for any news on its possible sale of its stake in Egg.
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