Some reassuring economic data from the US plus encouraging interim reports from two of the UK biggest companies BP and Royal Bank of Scotland brought a halt to the recent decline in London's benchmark index, the FTSE 100.
And the late rally in the top 100 stocks also brought a measure of relief for the rest of the market although it was not sufficient to prevent the FTSE 250, SmallCap and Techmark 100 indices from posting relatively light losses on the session.
Earlier in the day it had looked increasingly likely that all the main indices would suffer from renewed selling pressure induced by Wall Street's rather poor showing on Monday when the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 111 points and the Nasdaq Composite 32 points.
Sentiment on Wall Street was affected by some rather panicky warnings that the non-farm productivity data for the second quarter released yesterday would include a severe downwards revision of previous numbers and which would cause a sharp reversal on Wall Street.
In the event the economic news from the US gave global markets a shot in the arm. Productivity rose a stronger than expected 2.5 per cent with first quarter productivity revised upwards while the much-feared revision to data for 1996-2000 was much smaller than the doomsters had predicted.
London's reaction to that news was instant with a 40 points decline in the FTSE 100 immediately ahead of the news, reduced to one of 17 points.
And with the Dow embarking on a strong run and posting a 70-point gain, after an initial modest the FTSE 100 ended the session 10.4 firmer at 5,536.8.
The FTSE 250 settled 28.6 off at 6,160.7, but still finished well clear of its 6,138.2 low of the day, while the FTSE SmallCap was down 13.0 at 2,761.0. The Techmark 100 finished off at 1,589.43.
Turnover took some time to pick up from Monday's depressed levels but accelerated during the afternoon, eventually reaching a highly respectable 1.8 billion shares primed by keen interest in market heavyweights as Vodafone, BP and Shell.
