European Stock Futures Higher; Strong HSBC Earnings Help
02 Aug 2021
European stock markets are expected to open higher Monday, helped by a degree of stability in Asia overnight and strong results from banking giant HSBC.
At 2 AM ET (0600 GMT), the DAX Futures contract in Germany traded 0.4% higher, CAC 40 Futures in France climbed 0.5% and the FTSE 100 Futures contract in the U.K. rose 0.4%.
Asia markets traded higher Monday, creating a positive handover for Europe, as Chinese equity markets stabilizing after last week’s heavy selloff on the back of the crackdown by local regulators on the tech and education sectors. The tone was helped by a call from Chinese regulators for dialogue with their U.S. counterparts over Chinese companies’ listings in the U.S.
Also helping the tone Monday were strong quarterly results from HSBC , Europe’s largest bank by assets. The banking giant’s pretax profit for the first half of the year came in at $10.8 billion, more than double the performance for the same period last year. It also reinstated its dividend payments and released $700 million that had been set aside to cover potential bad loans.
Elsewhere, Heineken , the world’s second-largest brewer, beat first-half earnings expectations, but warned of weakness in the rest of the year as costs eat into margins.
The FTSE MIB climbed up by 0.87% to 25,579.82. In the cash markets, the DAX Germany was trading up 0.45% to 15,616.17. CAC 40 in France rose by 0.83% to 6,667.60 while the FTSE 100 in the U.K. were up by 0.98% to 7,102.35. ,at the time of writing.