Europe

At the beginning of October 2016, I wrote an article about the STOXX Supersector Europe 600 Basic Resources Index, and the possibility for this Index to start an intermediate uptrend. From that period we had an increase of about 36% until late February 2017, and now we are in a retracement window that started on February 22th with a drawdown of about -13%.

To better understand the performance of this Supersector it is advisable to take into consideration the historical graph prices of the last twenty-seven years.

Swiss companies are at the top of the list of the most profitable companies in Europe: Roche and Nestlé are in the Top 10, ranked first and third respectively, according to the EC consulting firm.

In the top 100 companies worldwide, there are eight Swiss groups: in addition to Roche – with an Ebit of €12.9 billion recorded in 2016 – and Nestlé we can find Novartis (12th place), ABB (69th), LafargeHolcim ( 72th), Richemont (88th), Swisscom (96th), and Syngenta (98th).

Between american companies, Apple has achieved operating profit of $ 60 billion last year, as equal as the five most profitable European companies.
According to the study, which considered the 600 (300 + 300) largest groups listed in Europe and the United States, 30% of American companies are on average more profitable than those of the Old Continent. Their operating margins last year were 12.7% (11.9% in 2015) compared with 9.8% (9.6% in 2015) for European companies.

French voters have elected centrist Emmanuel Macron as the country’s youngest president ever, delivering a resounding victory to the unabashedly pro-European former investment banker and strengthening France’s place as a central pillar of the European Union.

Such a comfortable Macron win is in line with what pollsters have been saying for weeks, with most polls saying that the 39-year-old centrist would win with a lead of around 20 points. His final lead, of 31 points, dwarfed even this.

Marine Le Pen, his far-right opponent in the presidential runoff, quickly called the 39-year-old to concede defeat after voters rejected her "French-first" nationalism by a large margin. Macron swept the board geographically, with Le Pen winning just two of France’s 107 departments.

Flows into European stocks gathered momentum since the end of April, in a resurging trend that accelerated sharply in the first week of May, reflecting a new positive sentiment towards the European markets after that investors had run off in 2016 and now, in just one week, poured 2,5 billions into European equity funds. Many reasons explain this new positive sentiment, from the evaporation of political risk after the French vote, to an improved economic confidence after that the ECB president Mario Draghi expressed optimism about the region’s economic recovery, still keeping the actual monetary stimulus.

Swiss students require Erasmus: the youth arms of several political parties are petitioning the government to resume negotiations for Switzerland to rejoin the student exchange programme.

When Switzerland was compelled to suspend negotiations to join Erasmus+ after voting to place limits on immigration from the European Union in a 2014 referendum, it established a replacement, the Swiss-European Mobility Programme, within six weeks.
It was successful in the majority of cases. In fact, Switzerland’s incoming and outgoing student mobility increased between 2014-15 and 2015-16.

Greece has reached a preliminary deal with its creditors that should pave the way for long-awaited debt relief talks, the Greek finance minister said Tuesday. “The negotiations are concluded,” Euclid Tsakalotos told reporters, according to state agency ANA. After overnight talks, Tsakalotos said a “preliminary technical agreement” had been achieved ahead of a May 22 meeting of eurozone finance ministers, which is required to approve the deal.

Talks on the deal, which includes labour and energy reforms as well as pension cuts and tax rises, had dragged on for half a year mainly due to a rift between the European Union and the International Monetary Fund over fiscal targets.

More Brits now believe Brexit is a bad idea than a good one for the first time since the shock referendum result, according to a new poll by YouGov. Asked "in hindsight, was Britain right or wrong to vote to leave the EU?", the YouGov poll in The Times newspaper found that 45% said wrong (up two), while 43% said right (down three), meanwhile, 12% said they didn’t know.

More Remainers than Brexiteers believed they’d made the right decision, with 89% of remain voters saying the result was the wrong decision, compared with 85% of leave voters who still backed exiting the EU.

Russia has offered Switzerland to sign an agreement in collaboration in the sphere of customs, Ruslan Davydov, first deputy director of Russia’s Federal Customs Service told TASS on Saturday, on the sidelines of a conference of the World Customs Organization, which took place in Vienna on April 19-21. The event was attended by representatives of 51 nations and the EU. Russia has become a member of WCO in 1992, as a legal successor to the USSR.