It has been growing steadily stronger since sinking below 5,000 in October. The progress has accelerated in recent weeks, and after a subdued start on Monday the index has climbed more than 250 on the opening trading days of the year.New year rallies are not unusual. The mid cap index jumped 74.2 to 4,944.4 and the small cap 20.3 to 2,110. It was swollen towards the close when, in what appeared to be a bought deal, 253.76 million Telewest Communication shares went through at 175.25p.Suddenly, it seemed that institutions, sidelined last month by the festive season and the run-up to the euro, were awash with cash. If they were unable to buy into any of the currently fashionable Footsie areas, such as drugs and telecoms, they were content to alight on any blue chip so long as the asking price was not too outrageous.Such was the clamour that even some of the long-neglected second-liners found themselves in demand. It is now just 30.2 below the peak achieved in July last year.

The new year stampede was fuelled in part by New York's strength, with the Dow Jones Average hitting a high during London trading. Other world markets were in form, with the successful launch of the euro one of the factors behind their progress. Turnover nudged 1.5 billion shares. FOOTSIE SCORED its second-highest one-day gain in the second-busiest trading session on record. With institutional investors, domestic and foreign, chasing shares with what appeared to be a grim determination, the blue chip index burst through the 6,100 barrier, soaring 190.6 points to 6,148.8. The contracts are with Barclays Bank, Anglia Polytechnic University, English Partnerships and the Health & Safety Executive. Carrying out the four contracts will require an extra 150 staff in addition to the 1,000 Aqumen currently employs.. JOHN MOWLEM's facilities management subsidiary, Aqumen, has been awarded four management contracts due to start in 1999 with a total value of pounds 24m a year, Mowlem's chief executive, John Gains, announced yesterday.

Tornos Bechler is a leading manufacturer of high performance automatic lathes for producing precision turned machine parts. The existing management of the company will remain, and it is intended to float the business on the stock market within three to five years.. The company will also use agents, Richard Harvey, the group chief executive, said.. DOUGHTY HANSON, which claims to be Europe's leading independent private equity company, has agreed to acquire Tornos Bechler, based in Moutier, Switzerland.

NORWICH UNION has been granted a licence to set up a company to sell pensions to private individuals in the east European country, Poland. New regulations introducing personal pensions for individuals as a top up to the basic state pension are due to come into effect in Poland shortly. Norwich Union intends to sell pensions directly to Polish citizens as well as through bank assurance and insurance company channels. The process may take a few years, but the rewards will be worth waiting for."It's like panning for gold," says Andy Allars, an investment manager with Prelude. "If you have a hit you make a fortune, but you could also lose your shirt." He adds that where biotechnology companies are concerned the potential benefits are much higher because the company will have a monopoly on any drug that successfully makes it to market.Nevertheless, the table shows that when it comes to taking a lot on trust, biotechnology investors still take the biscuit.. They tend to prefer discounted cash-flow models, which carefully forecast a company's likely future performance and then express the value of future cash flows in today's money.So Phytopharm is highly rated because investors think its drugs have a good prospect of making it to market and cleaning up. For companies where sales are poised to explode, as in the case of biotech or Internet companies, conventional valuations soon become meaningless.As a result, simple multiples of earnings and sales have been all but discarded by investors.