Strong earnings news lifts ITV and IAG Well-received earnings news helped to give London equities traders some welcome distraction from waiting for the results of the European Central Bank's latest refinancing operation. ITV made the best single showing on the FTSE 100 after it reported a 24 per cent rise in adjusted profit before tax of £398m. The maker of the X Factor and Coronation Street television programmes said that while it remained cautious about the outlook for advertising in the year ahead, it expected to outperform the market. Its shares rose 7.3 per cent to 86.3pm the biggest gain on the index by a clear margin. The owner of British Airways was in second place. International Airlines Group reported operating profit of £485m. The company, formed by the merger of BA and Iberia, Spain's flag carrier, said savings made after the deal helped its performance. It also said it expected year-on-year cost pressures to ease during the second half of the current year. Fuel costs for 2011 rose 29.7 per cent to €5.1bn. The stock rose 2.9 per cent to 167.8p. Standard Chartered, the UK bank focused on emerging markets, was also in demand after its annual earnings met forecasts, rising 11 per cent to $6.8bn. The rest of the banking sector also made gains ahead of news of the amount of money borrowed from the European Central Bank under the terms of its second long-term refinancing operation (LTRO). HSBC led the sector, rising 1.2 per cent to 566p. "The key questions today will be how big this LTRO will be, and how will it affect the markets because there is certainly no evidence that the extra money is finding its way into the European economy," said Michael Hewson, senior market analyst at CMC Markets. If the LTRO has a low take-up this could well be seen as a positive in that banks haven't felt the need to use the facility, while a similar figure to the first one could well be broadly neutral. In any case it remains hard to gauge, given that if banks are given what looks tantamount a pass to some free money, they'll take it whether they need it or not. The FTSE 100 remained in neutral gear, ticking 3 points higher to 5,930.31 after gains of 12 points over the previous session.