A strong US open – we’ll see of that lasts – helped the European indices build on their midday gains, with the FTSE continuing to lag behind its peers.
The Dow Jones jumped around 200 points after the bell, the 8% and 15% surges from non-Dow members Tesla and Twitter providing a more general lift to sentiment in the US. That rebound put the index back around 24750, off of Wednesday’s sub-24550 lows but nearly 2000 points adrift of where it began October. The Dow is going to get another big test after-hours, both directly, in the form of Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)'s (NASDAQ:GOOG) third quarter results, and indirectly, through Amazon's (NASDAQ:AMZN) own Q3 update.
With some positive, banking-related chatter from Italy, and a fairly uneventful ECB meeting, the Eurozone indices leapt higher as the day went on. The FTSE MIB maintained a 1.5% rise, with the CAC expanding its gains to a 5000-crossing 1.4%. The DAX, meanwhile, was a bit less enthusiastic, in part thanks to a drop in Germany’s Ifo business climate reading, but still climbed 75 points to hit 11250.
As for the FTSE, it could only eke out a 0.2% increase this Thursday, prevented from doing any better by a near 16% decline from WPP (LON:WPP), and notable declines from the likes of BT Group (LON:BT), ITV (LON:ITV), AstraZeneza and GlaxoSmithKline. Nevertheless, that is a substantial turnaround from the 7 month low-hitting 1% plunge suffered during early trading.
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