In another busy week for local companies Morrisons finally had a break when the company managed to broker a deal at lunchtime on Thursday with the unions and avoid a strike at its distribution centres.

Kelda has restated its figures for the year to March 31 under new International Financial Reporting Standards, which were introduced at the beginning of this year. In line with many other water companies the figures show very little impact on earnings per share and analysts therefore see very little impact on the share price.

Bradford and Bingley has announced that its Group Finance Director, Rosemary Thorne, will leave at the end of the year. She will be replaced by Chris Willford, who has previously worked for Abbey, Barclays and British Airways.

The shares managed to shrug off a sector-wide downgrade by analysts at Smith Barney. The rating on Bradford and Bingley was kept at hold, but the price target was lowered to 320p from 325p. The shares, however, broke though both the old and new targets, rallying from 325p to over 340p over the week.

Among the smaller-cap issues Real Affinity has been on a rollercoaster ride over the last few days as conformation that it was in talks with Langbar International saw the shares rocket from 0.33p to a high of 0.95p in one day, as can be seen on the chart.

However, what cannot be seen on the graph, is Friday's nosedive back to 0.4p as details of the offer were released. The independent directors have agreed to an offer of 1 new share in Langbar for every 200 shares in Real Affinity.

This equates to an offer of approximately 0.39p per share based on the closing price of Langbar on Thursday.

Belgravium Technologies announced last week the proposed acquisition of Touchstar Technologies, a manufacturer and distributor of hand-held mobile computing devices to three niche markets. The deal constitutes a reverse take-over under AIM listing rules and will require the approval of Belgravium's shareholders.

This will be sought at an EGM to be held on October 21. The market took the news very well, sending Belgravium's shares up 16 per cent on the day, despite the announcement that the deal would be funded through a placing of 33.6 million new ordinary shares at 14p. The company added that it expects second half trading to be as strong as the first, with greater visibility of orders going forward.

Atlantic Global announced another disappointing trading update a matter of days after announcing the resignation of the chairman, David Cox and further cuts in sales and marketing staff.

The company has blamed this on a 'longer sales cycle' than had previously been anticipated and as a result expects the benefits to be seen more in the second half.

With high levels of interest in the company's products and services, the directors are confident that the rest of 2005 and into 2006 will see satisfactory levels of growth. In the meantime the company is looking for a new chairman with a financial background to oversee a review of operations.