Spain’s Ibex 35 opened Thursday with a 0.4% gain, lifting the Madrid benchmark to 11,625 points at 9:00 a.m. in a session when Wall Street would be quiet due to Thanksgiving.
The session also carried the advance reading of Spain’s Consumer Price Index for November, which rose 0.2% from October and nudged the annual rate up by six tenths to 2.4%.
Investors’ attention, on the other hand, will focus on how the holiday shopping season unfolds, officially kicking off tomorrow with Black Friday.
In corporate Spain, Grifols’ board agreed with Brookfield, the Canadian fund that had considered a bid, that given current conditions the transaction cannot proceed, effectively bringing the deal to a close.
For its part, OHLA posted losses of 58.3 million euros in the first nine months of 2024 versus a 14.2 million euro profit in the same period a year earlier, due to accounting impacts such as equity method adjustments, exchange rate differences, and impairment and disposal of financial instruments.
Additionally, Cementos Portland Valderrivas, 99.52% owned by Inmocemento and heading the group’s cement division, reached a binding agreement to sell its stake in Giant Cement for about 600 million dollars (568.9 million euros).
In the early trading hours of Thursday, the top movers in the Ibex 35 were BBVA with a 1.68% rise, Banco Sabadell up 1.25%, CaixaBank up 0.98%, and Banco Santander up 0.94%. In contrast, the weakest are Bankinter down 3.19% due to the ex-dividend effect, Grifols down 1.32%, and Enagás down 0.31%.
European stock markets also opened higher, with gains of 0.67% in Frankfurt, 0.52% in Paris, 0.31% in Milan, and 0.17% in London.
At the market open, Brent crude, the benchmark for Europe, fell 0.54% to $71.91 a barrel, while Texas Intermediate stood at $68.33, down 0.57%.
In the currency market, the euro strengthened to 1.0534 dollars, while in the debt market the yield on Spain’s 10-year bond rose to 2.865%.