Europe close: Stocks continue to push higher despite poor data

Germany's Dax pushed to a fresh all-time high and the Cac-40 traded near its best mark in five years on Wednesday, despite what some economists labelled a 'terrible' reading on euro area industrial production at the end of 2019.

Helping to boost investor sentiment, overnight, China's Zhong Nanshan, who led the fight against SARS in 2003, said the new Covid-19 virus would likely peak in mid or late February and hopefully end in April.

"The past ten years have seen a host of crises, about which much ink has been spilled. While the economic impact on China will take months to calculate, and is certainly not yet fully apparent, it does look like investors have decided the virus is no longer a threat," said IG's Chris Beauchamp.

By the end of trading, the benchmark Stoxx 600 was ahead by 0.63% to 431.16, alongside a 0.89% gain to 13,749.78 for the German Dax, while the FTSE Mibtel was up by 0.70% at 24,861.28.

Helping stocks along, euro/dollar fell 0.39% to 1.0877.

Stock in Evolution Gaming Group paced gains on the Stoxx 600 after posting a 49.0% jump in sales for 2019 to reach €365.8m which catapulted its stock to a record high.

Polymer manufacturer Trelleborg was close behind on the leaderboard despite reporting flat sales for its fourth quarter on an organic basis.

Bank of Ireland shares rallied alongside, breaking a five-day losing streak.

ABN Amro was the top faller after the Dutch lender posted a 11.5% fall in full-year net profits to €2.05bn.

In parallel, front month Brent crude oil futures rallied 3.5% to trade at $55.97 a barrel on the ICE.

That was despite Eurostat reporting that the bloc's industrial output - excluding construction - contracted at a month-on-month pace of 2.1% in December (consensus: -1.6%), with France and Italy registering the sharpest declines.

Production of capital goods was weakest, slumping by 4.0% from the previous month.

Claus Vistesen at Pantheon Macroeconomics labelled the figures "terrible" and that while some of the weakness might be statistical noise, it was entirely possible that it could herald a dovish shift by the European Central Bank in March.

For his part, speaking from Hong Kong, ECB chief economist, Philip Lane, warned that the coronavirus could deal a "pretty serious short-term hit" to the Eurozone economy, but he expected a bounce back and for the full-year impact to be "relatively minor".

Highlighting the euro area's quandary, Italy's national statistics office, ISTAT, reported that deaths in the country exceeded births by nearly 212,000 in 2019, with the total population count slipping to 60.32m.