Global stocks surged to record highs after the drug companies Pfizer and BioNTech announced that their coronavirus vaccine was 90% effective in trials, giving hope that economies around the world can soon return to normal. The announcement just before midday in London prompted a flurry of activity across global financial markets. MSCI’s all-country world index on Monday surpassed its previous record high even before the announcement as investors digested Joe Biden’s US presidential election victory, according to Bloomberg data. The vaccine news pushed the FTSE 100 to 6,186 points, an increase of 4.7% or 276 points, adding more than £70bn to the value of the bluechip index. It was the FTSE’s biggest one-day gain since March, and its highest closing level since 12 August before fears of a second wave of Covid-19 began to weigh on markets. On Wall Street, the benchmark S&P 500 index jumped to a record high of 3,645.99 points before retreating to a 1.17% gain. The Dow Jones industrial average and the tech-focused Nasdaq Composite index also hit new records before dropping back. The tech heavy Nasdaq ended the day down 1.5% as investors sold Netflix, Peloton and Zoom and other companies that have benefitted from a pandemic boost. The Dow ended the day up 2.95%. Many of the most pronounced stock market gainers on Monday were the companies most affected by restrictions on movement brought in to fight the pandemic, while companies that have most benefited from lockdowns retreated from some of their spectacular gains. On the FTSE 100 the biggest winners included the jet engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce, whose earnings are closely tied to the hours flown by planes around the globe. Its shares almost doubled in value within hours of the news, before retreating to a 44% gain. Shares in the events company Informa soared by 22% and British Airways’ owner, International Airlines Group, gained as much as 40% before settling to a 25% increase for the day. The smaller FTSE 250, which contains more UK-focused companies, jumped 5.2%. Shares in Cineworld, the world’s second biggest cinema chain, gained 40%, although they were still worth only a fifth of their value at the start of the year, with most of its branches closed. Shares in the cruise company Carnival, whose ships were at the centre of multiple prominent coronavirus outbreaks, jumped by 38% to their highest point since June, albeit again only a fraction of their pre-pandemic worth. Home delivery and video conferencing companies have had huge share price increases during 2020, with quarantined users flocking to their platforms, but the prospect of a quicker easing of lockdowns cooled investor optimism on their prospects. The value of Zoom Video Communications has more than septupled during 2020 as it rose from business application to household name, but its shares lost 14% on Monday. Shares in the exercise bike company Peloton Interactive fell 16% as investors questioned whether the pandemic-induced boom in home exercise equipment would last. The UK home grocery delivery company Ocado lost 12%, and the Anglo-Dutch food delivery company Just Eat Takeaway fell by 9%. The online white goods retailer AO World – whose sales rose sharply during the first lockdown – lost 11%. Pfizer shares gained 11%, while the US-listed BioNTech rose by 12%. The prospect of a faster recovery in global economic activity triggered strong gains in oil prices. Futures prices for a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude oil, the North American benchmark, rose by 9% to $40.58, while the North Sea equivalent, Brent crude, gained 8% to $42.71. Gold prices fell by as much as 4.8% to $1,853 per troy ounce, down from above $1,960 on Monday morning, as investors abandoned the traditional safe haven in favour of riskier assets. The Bank of England’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, said he was hopeful that the vaccination news would deliver a quick boost of confidence to the economy, even before vaccines are widely available. The prospect of a vaccine could help avoid the “prolongation of this stop-start cycling” between lockdown and reopening, enabling businesses to invest again, he said in streamed discussion with the Reform thinktank. Paul Craig, a portfolio manager at Quilter Investors, an investment manager, said the remarkably rapid development of a vaccine candidate less than a year after the first cases were discovered was “hugely positive news” but warned that it was “not a silver bullet”. He said: “Many of the issues facing developed economies now are structural and a vaccine is not going to prevent the large-scale unemployment we are likely to see as a result of the lockdowns of earlier this year. For now, however, it is a positive and the companies benefiting certainly represent a reopening trade of some sorts.”