Banco Santander delivered an attributable profit of €1,867 million during the first quarter of 2017, +14% compared to Q1 2016. Excluding currency movements, profit before tax increased by 17% to €3,311 million . The underlying business performance was strong, with positive trends in all markets and particularly good growth in Latin America, Spain and Santander Consumer Finance.
Making judgements on “whether a market is expensive or cheap,” using aggregates of prices and earnings, is a very risky simplification. To begin with, there are companies which don’t make money or even lose it, and quite a lot of it. Responsible, professional investors don’t buy stock markets indices, they buy shares. They don’t invest “top-down” but rather “bottom-up”.
Investors realise that the political risk in France has decreased substantially and are less concerned about what might happen on the political front in Italy and Germany. Now it’s time to look at companies’ fundamentals once again and continue to focus on the ECB’s decisions over the coming months.
Miquel y Costas has known how to create a niche for itself amongst the big global producers, taking advantage of the fact it is historically well-positioned in its sector (paper for the tobacco industry), with very few competitors and high entry barriers.
Ezentis ended 2016 with an order book worth €848.4 million and a ratio of 2.8x sales. This figure, combined with the fact the bulk of the order book is recent (79% of the contracts awarded in 2016), guarantee a large part of the group’s future results, as well as reducing their volatility.
Particularly affected by the Brexit vote, due to its UK exposure, Sabadell’s share price has moved sideways and accumulated underperformance vis-à-vis the broader sector until the US election. As reported by Carax-Alphavalue, the latter’s outcome was “rapidly digested”, freeing the stock’s upside potential which has regained a large portion of the lost ground.
Benjamin Cole | The last time commercial property prices topped out was July of 2007. House prices appear to be rising still, though at a slower rate by various indices. On a per-square-foot basis, house prices in the U.S. have not budged since May of last year. That could be important, suggesting that houses now selling are larger, and the middle-class is dropping out of the market.
From a conservative standpoint, given the current dividend, the European bourse offers a higher return than the US stock market. At current prices, and taking into account the dividend paid against 2016 results, the Euro Stoxx 50 offers a dividend yield of 3.4% versus the 2.0% offered by the S&P 500. If we take as a reference the dividends estimated against 2017 or 2018 results, the outlook doesn’t vary much, maintaining a differential close to 1.5% of annual return, in favour of the European bourse.
The US stock market represents 54% of the MSCI world markets’ index and 60% of the MSCI for developed countries, according to The Economist. It’s another indicator to add to those we have mentioned before which point to the US market being overvalued.
Fixed income’s scant returns has led Norway’s sovereign fund to focus on equity investment. This now accounts for 65 percent of exposure. At the same time, the Norwegian government estimates that investment in the stock market will reach 70 percent to boost profits in the coming years. Hilde C. Bjørnland, professor of Economics at the Norwegian Business School and Director of the Centre for applied economy and oil explains why.