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A worker shelters from the rain as he passes the London Stock Exchange in the City of London at lunchtime October 1, 2008.
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LONDON - The FTSE 100 <.FTSE> is seen opening 9 to 14 points or 0.3 percent higher on Friday according to financial bookmakers, tracking gains overnight on Wall Street and in Asia ahead of the latest U.S. employment report which is expected to show the fewest job losses since August 2008.
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The blue chip index closed 0.4 percent higher on Thursday as the Bank of England and the European Central Bank kept interest rates steady, while data from the U.S, which showed a rise in productivity and fall in initial weekly jobless claims, also soothed investors' nerves.
The FTSE 100 is on track to rise 1.6 percent on the week, the best weekly gain in a month. The index has so far rebounded 48 percent since hitting a trough in March.
Investor focus for the day is likely to be on U.S. non-farm payrolls data, due at 1:30 p.m. The U.S. economy is expected to have shed 175,000 jobs in October, the 22nd month of job losses, but slower than the 263,000 cuts seen in September. Unemployment, however, is forecast to climb to 9.9 percent.
U.S. stocks received a boost on Thursday after strong results from Cisco Systems
Shares in Asia also rose, with gains spread evenly across the materials, industrials, technology and financials.
(Reporting by Harpreet Bhal)
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