Brent crude is now trading just over $92 a barrel, close to a two and a half year low, and compared with $115 a barrel in June and WTI US crude is around $90 a barrel, the lowest since April 2013. Oil and gas shares have fallen as crude falls back…

Tesco is down 3.5% to 179p, Morrison is down 5% to 159p and Sainsbury’s is down 5% to 238p after the latter reported sales which were less bad than expected but called into question its dividend policy and caused profit estimates to be cut by nearly a fifth to £650 million

Range resources, the troubled oil and gas explorer, with assets in Trinidad, Texas, Georgia and Columbia managed to disappoint shareholders with the release of its annual financial report for the year ending June 2014.

After a near 10% fall on Friday and 15% drop last week, Quindell’s board was forced to issue an RNS this morning stating that it knows of no reason for such falls.

There has been a big difference in the performance of big cap and small cap stocks this year with the Russell 2000 index down 3.5% year to date (after gaining 37% in 2013) and the FTSE AIM All share index down around 14%.

Moroccan focused, AIM and ASX listed, oil and gas explorer Tangiers Petroleum (TPET) finally came back from suspension yesterday and as expected the various RNS’s didn’t contain much good news for beleaguered shareholders.

The Bloomberg Commodity index which tracks twenty key global commodities and the related Goldman Sachs Commodity index (GSCI) are both looking pretty poorly right now, with the former down at 5 year lows as worries about Chinese growth continue to way on investors minds.

Just when shareholders in Tesco thought it couldn’t get any worse after a series of profit warnings, there was another dramatic announcement this morning that trading profits for the first half of the year had been overstated by £250 million due to “to the accelerated recognition of commercial income and delayed accrual of costs”.

It was another good week for US stocks this week, with the sixth week of gains out of seven. The S&P 500 index touched an all-time intraday high of 2,019 in early trade on Friday but fell later in the day to finish at 2,010.

After strong investor demand, Jack Ma’s Alibaba Group Holding Ltd will have their IPO at $68 on the NYSE and will start trading later today, in one of the world’s largest ever initial public offerings, valuing the company at $168 billion.