Trading was somewhat tentative as many investors eased themselves gently into the new business hours, which will see the London and Paris market opening an hour earlier and Frankfurt half an hour later, so that all three markets start trading at 0700 GMT.

Those investors who set their alarm clocks an hour earlier were taking their cue from Wall Street, which rallied 66 points to 10.803.63 points on Friday, and from Asia, where the Tokyo market gained 1.3 per cent.In London, the FT-SE 100 index of leading shares put on 16 points in early deals, but quickly slipped back towards its opening level, standing at 6,040.0 points after an hour of deals, up just 0.2 points on the day.

In Paris, the CAC 40 index opened higher but lost some ground to standat 4,658.3 points, a 13.98-point gain. In Frankfurt meanwhile the DAX index pushed up 23.90 points at 5,327.84 at the opening.

The London market was dominated by the news that Rolls-Royce was to buy Defence engineering group Vickers for $933 million. The offer values Vickers at 250 pence a share and stock in the company soared 79.5 pence to 245 pence, while Rolls-Royce shed eight pence to 218 pence. Trading was otherwise thin in the extra breakfast-time hour of dealing, but the index was pushed higher by some of the biggest bluechip companies which notched up gains. Vodafone AirTouch gained 18 pence to 1,271 pence, BP Amoco put on eight pence to 1,118 and Barclays added nine pence to 1,640.

In Paris meanwhile, trading in shares in Paribas was suspended pending a statement to be issued by its new owner BNP, and glass company Saint-Gobain announced an a greed bid for a US plastics group Furon.