From comfortably exceeding 9,200 points to putting 9,000 at risk. The Ibex-35 is headed this Friday for its worst session of the year, with a fall of 1.8% that annuls all hope of maintaining its upward weekly streak.
After the rally at the beginning of the year, investors are taking the opportunity to collect benefits, especially in companies that had been registering better behavior this 2023. The selective market is especially damaged by the downturn suffered by the Inditex price. The textile giant has come to lose more than 4.5% in the worst moments of the session, after the salary agreement reached for its store employees.
The large tourist companies are other of those that put the most downward pressure, with losses of 4.5% for IAG and more than 3.5% for Aena, Amadeus and Meliá.
It is foreseeable that the Ibex will moderate its falls as the session progresses, awaiting the behavior of Wall Street. But profit taking seems inevitable. And that the selective counted on Friday with the support of great values such as Repsol, which is detached from the red numbers with a strong rise of 3%, benefited by the recent rise in oil prices.
In the midst of the Russian production cuts, a barrel of Brent, a reference in Europe, rises close to 2% to exceed 86 dollars, while the American West Texas is close to 80 dollars.
Watch out for central banks
With few macroeconomic references capable of acting as a catalyst for the markets, investors have been turning their eyes to the fight against inflation by central banks for some days. Link Securities analysts point out that, on Wall Street, investors are already beginning to accept that the fight against high prices will last longer than what was initially discounted.
And the same is happening in Europe. “The ECB will continue to raise rates at the rate of half a percentage point at least in its next two meetings,” they estimate. “The region’s bond market is already beginning to reflect this possibility, while the variable income market has not yet picked it up, given the strength shown by the prices of some values/sectors that this scenario does not benefit at all,” they insist.
This premise of higher rates for longer – and the fear of a negative impact on the pace of economic recovery – is what has caused the rise in yields in the bond markets this week. In the US, the interest on the ten-year bond has gone from 3.40% to 3.70% in just five sessions. And in Europe the interest on the German bond exceeds 2.35%, from the 2% that it barely exceeded last week.
Against this background, investors are already beginning to look at the US CPI data that will be released next Tuesday, which will undoubtedly mark the behavior of the Stock Markets in the short term.