At the close today the UK market was well off its highs with banks weighing heavily.

You can almost write the weekend headlines after today's performance by financial stocks in London – the short selling ban was lifted today and the likes of Barclays and RBS have been the biggest casualties. But it was only in the afternoon that the sector swan dived as US markets quickly gave up earlier gains. Today's drop by some of the banking stocks – whether short selling was the catalyst or not – still goes to demonstrate the level of nervousness and complete lack of confidence from investors in this sector of the market. With negative news still coming out of the US banking market and the nationalising of Anglo Irish Bank investors clearly feel that banks have not hit the bottom yet.

On the positive side for today, mining stocks continued their recent recovery with the likes of Rio Tinto and Anglo American up by around 7%. This is another sector that has reeled from negative sentiment in 2008 but the performance so far this year seems to suggest – for the short term at least – that traders think the falls here have been overdone. Today's banking sell-off has left the FTSE still looking vulnerable – so far this year the index is off by around 7%. For now the risk is for further weakness when we return on Monday and based on current sentiment it would not be surprising to see the FTSE start with a three before January is out.

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