Investors are facing a busy week in which many companies will publish quarterly figures, such as temporary employment group Randstad and telecom company KPN. International companies are also opening the books, including Facebook parent Meta Platforms, food and care products manufacturer Unilever and tech company Amazon.
Tuesday and Wednesday are particularly busy days. On Tuesday, for example, paint manufacturer AkzoNobel, chip company ASMI and Randstad will present their figures for the first three months of 2023. Chipmaker Besi and chemicals distributor IMCD will follow, among others.
Various shareholders’ meetings are also planned, such as at the Veldhoven chip machine builder ASML and ING. Extinction Rebellion activists have announced that they will take action at the ING meeting, which will take place on Monday. They say they want to force the bank to stop financing the fossil industry.
Growth, inflation and wages
In the macroeconomic field, investors are looking forward to data on economic growth, inflation and wages in the United States, among other things. With this publication, the US central bank has almost all the information for the interest rate meetings in May. Those meetings will also take place in Europe that month. On Friday, it will become clear to what extent the economy in the eurozone has developed over the past quarter, when the provisional figures are published.
In anticipation of interest rate meetings next month, European stock markets seemed subdued for the weekend. The AEX did not move much on Friday, and closed with a gain of 0.1 percent at 762.19 points. The Midcap fell 0.6 percent to 929.68 points, partly because high-speed trader Flow Traders plummeted after making considerably less profit. The stock exchanges in London, Frankfurt and Paris ended about 0.5 percent higher.
Wall Street
The general mood on Wall Street was also expectant on Friday. The Dow Jones index closed 0.1 percent higher at 33,808.96 points. The broad S&P 500 also gained 0.1 percent to 4133.52 points, as did tech exchange Nasdaq, which closed at 12,072.46 points.
