Earnings growth may propel FTSE higher

London's stock market, which reached a four-year high point on Friday, will be looking to extend month-long gains this week amid strong earnings growth for companies, analysts said.
The FTSE 100 index of leading London shares closed at 5,498.9 points on Friday, a rise of 0.62 percent or 33.8 points from the previous week.
It was the fourth week in a row that the index had closed higher.
The FTSE 100 hit an intra-day high of 5,531.60 points on Friday, the best level since August 2001.
"Overall there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic on equity markets in all of Europe," said Lars Kreckel, an analyst for Dutch bank ABN Amro.
"Valuations are more attractive than they were a year ago. Earnings have grown faster than (share) prices have."
Kreckel added that earnings were set to grow by about 10 percent next year - a "very decent" return.
The FTSE remains almost 21 percent below the record high of 6,930.20 points reached in 1999 at the height of the dot.com bubble.
Leading British companies easyJet, InterContinental Hotels and supermarket Tesco publish their own earnings reports this week.
Elsewhere, the Bank of England (BoE) publishes minutes from its latest rate-setting meeting next Wednesday, two days before the official second estimate of third-quarter gross domestic product (GDP) growth in Britain.
The bank's "minutes could well strike a slightly more dovish tone than those seen in recent months", according to analysts at Credit Suisse First Boston.
The BoE conceded on Wednesday that its near-term outlook for British inflation and economic growth was weaker than previously thought, according to the central bank's quarterly report.
The outlook came a week after its policymakers decided to keep British interest rates at 4.50 percent for a third month in a row.
The economy meanwhile grew by 0.4 percent during the third quarter of 2005 compared with 0.5 percent for the previous three-month period, according to initial estimates from the National Statistics office last month.
Gross domestic product (GDP) growth on a 12-month comparison stood at 1.6 percent during the third quarter, taking the annual rate up from a 12-year low of 1.5 percent in the previous quarter.