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DAVID SHAPIRO: No. In fact, I'm glad tomorrow is a holiday because the market's starting to take a shape that's very difficult to read. It's going nowhere. It's just drifting sideways. And there was no news today, really no market-moving news and it became very difficult to kind of read the direction in the market. Commodity prices came down slightly, so they took our mining shares down. We'll talk about financials. Also industrials still now digesting yesterday's news on interest rates. I think the market's now starting to discount that. We may not see further interest rate cuts here.

HILTON TARRANT: The producer price inflation numbers out - a 4% decline in August. A pretty big shock. A lot of people were expecting a better number.

DAVID SHAPIRO: Yes. Deflation's no good. Inflation's not good, but this kind of deflation is also no good. I think the hope is that, with a turnaround in the global economy and a bit of demand coming through, let's hope we'll start to see it stabilise. The strong rand's contributed to it, but unfortunately I think oil and food and electricity, in so much as it affects commodities, hasn't really stabilised that or brought that number up.

HILTON TARRANT: We saw a couple of trading updates out from the rats and mice today. The Don Group reports that it will produce a full-year loss of between 2.5 and 3.1c a share. A torrid time. Faritec out with numbers, though, and they seem to have turned the corner.

DAVID SHAPIRO: Well, we hope. New management's there. It's always difficult to turn a company around, particularly after severe losses like that. But it's been recapitalised, and that's a very interesting area of the business. Some businesses are doing pretty well there, others are battling a little. It depends on the customers and it also depends on what the product line is. But if they can get that right, sure, they've got as good a hope of turning it around as any.

HILTON TARRANT: We'll hear from Fanie van Rensburg, the new CEO at Faritec in just a bit.
But David, just to wrap up with, Liberty International issuing shares, raising £280m - quite dilutive to existing shareholders.

DAVID SHAPIRO: I think they needed that. They needed to recapitalise the company. They'd issued shares at a fairly big discount to the market. It was a bookbuild, but I think it's going to be done at almost a 10% discount. So the share price came back to the level at which they expected the bookbuild to take place. But it just shows you how troubled the property market is in the UK - and a company like Liberty has had to come to the market for equity capital, which is very expensive capital.