Cautious increase for equities on the edge of a busy week – archyworldys

by Marc Angrand

PARIS (Reuters) – Wall Street is expected to rise slightly while the European stock markets, except Paris, rose on Monday thanks in part to the good health of bank stocks and the rise in commodity prices, but the spreads remain limited before the multiple results publications expected in the coming days.

Futures contracts on major New York indices are up 0.03% for the Dow Jones, 0.13% for the Standard & Poor’s 500 and 0.26% for the Nasdaq.

Wall Street finished in the red on Friday but gained more than 1% over the past week and the major US indices are very close to their recent highs.

In Paris, the CAC 40, slowed down by Airbus and Safran, lost 0.1% to 6,726.67 points around 10:55 GMT while in London, the FTSE 100 rose 0.5% and in Frankfurt, the Dax advanced 0.22%.

The EuroStoxx 50 index gained 0.1%, the FTSEurofirst 300 0.11% and the Stoxx 600 0.06%, not far from the six-week high reached in session on Friday.

The week which begins will be animated in particular by the results of the mega-caps of the American high technology sector, with those of Facebook at the end of the day, of Microsoft and Alphabet on Tuesday, then of Apple and Amazon on Thursday.

This prospect encourages all the more waiting as the end of last week was marked by the fall of Snap (-26.6% on Friday) linked to the impact of Apple’s new data privacy policy. on its turnover.

The macroeconomic agenda for the coming days is also loaded with, among other things, the monetary policy meeting of the European Central Bank (ECB) on Thursday, which should provide new elements on the sustainability or not of the current inflationary surge, fueled by by tensions in supply chains and soaring oil prices.

The Ifo business climate index in Germany suffers from this, since it fell to its lowest level for six months.

OIL

The price of oil has reached new multi-year highs, still supported by the decline in global stocks which threatens to prolong tensions between supply and demand.

Brent gained 0.71% to 86.14 dollars a barrel after rising to 86.43, its highest level since October 2018, and US light crude (West Texas Intermediate, WTI) rose 0.82% to 84, $ 45 after peaking at 84.76, the highest since October 2014.

In a new study, Goldman Sachs estimates that the recovery in demand could push a barrel of Brent to more than 90 dollars by the end of the year.

VALUES IN EUROPE

The rise in oil and base metals once again favors that of values ​​in the European commodities sector, whose Stoxx index rose by 0.96%.

The banking compartment (+ 1.18%) reached its highest level since May 2019, taking advantage of the pleasant surprise of HSBC’s quarterly results (+ 1.10%), as well as the increase of 5.47 % of Sabadell after the Spanish group rejected an offer to buy back its subsidiary TSB by Co-operative Bank.

About 18% of the companies in the Stoxx 600 have already released their quarterly and 63% of them are above the consensus, according to Refinitiv data.

RATE

Benchmark bond yields are virtually unchanged at 1.659% for the US ten-year and -0.093% for its German equivalent.

Note on the European market, the outperformance of Italian government bonds after S&P Global raised the outlook on Rome’s BBB sovereign rating to “positive”.

CHANGES

The dollar hit a four-week low against other major currencies at the start of the day, amplifying the pullback triggered Friday by comments by Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, stressing that the time to raise interest rates had not yet come.

But the greenback then started to rise again against a benchmark basket (+ 0.11%).

The euro thus returns to around 1.1625 after peaking at 1.1664.

(Edited by Blandine Hénault)