Europe midday: Banks pace gains after bumper results from US peers
Stocks on the Continent are rallying after a negative start, tracking gains in US equity futures on the back of better-than-expected earnings from two of America's largest lenders and after upbeat economic data out of China.
Indeed, investor sentiment had been decidedly glum going into the Friday session and the Easter-shortened trading week.
Commenting on the sentiment in markets, earlier CMC Markets UK´s Michael Hewson had told clients: "The global economic outlook continues to look a little on the soft side, even without this week’s IMF growth downgrades, and yesterday saw US markets slip back ahead of the start of what is expected to be an earnings season, where expectations are set pretty low."
Against that backdrop, as of 1356 BST, the benchmark Stoxx 600 was adding 0.09% to 387.26, alongside a gain of 0.67% to 12,014.71 for the German Dax while Milan's FTSE Mibtel was putting on 0.93% to 21,887.0.
Lenders shares were pacing gains on the pan-European Stoxx 600, with a gauge for the sector adding 2.31% on the back of better-than-expected quarterly results out on Friday from US peers JP Morgan and Wells Fargo.
Companies in the Basic Resources space were also doing well, with a gauge for the sector adding 1.28%.
Overnight, official data revealed a sharp reversal in the year-on-year rate of Chinese exports growth from -20.8% in February to 14.2% for March, which easily beat the 6.4% rise that economists had anticipated.
It came alongside other figures showing a sharp pick up in the rate of growth of money supply.
Commenting on those money supply figures, Freya Beamish at Pantheon Macroeconomics said: "The upturn in M1 growth was to be expected but is a relief nonetheless. The green shoots of monetary loosening were there in January and February, but with Lunar New Year distortions, uncertainty was heightened."
Figures on euro area industrial production in the month of February also turned out better-than-expected, revealing a dip of only 0.2% on the month (consensus: -0.6%) after an upwardly revised rise of 1.9% in the month before.
In Spain meanwhile, the statistics office confirmed that consumer prices gains in the Mediterranean country accelerated by 0.2 percentage points in March to reach a year-on-year clip of 1.3%.