PARIS (Reuters) – The main European stock markets are trending upwards on Wednesday morning despite five consecutive sessions in the green, but the weakness of the gains reflects a certain caution before the Fed’s monetary policy announcements, while a new round of mixed corporate results is livening up discussions.

In Paris, the CAC 40, which set a new record at 7,702.95 points, rose 0.11% to 7,686.17 around 09:00 GMT. In London, the FTSE 100 gained 0.02% and in Frankfurt, the Dax gained 0.08%.

The EuroStoxx 50 index increased by 0.08%, the FTSEurofirst 300 by 0.3% and the Stoxx 600 by 0.19%, heading towards a seventh session in a row in the green.

Futures contracts on Wall Street forecast an increase of 0.12% for the Dow Jones, but a decrease of 0.32% for the Standard & Poor’s 500 and 0.82% for the Nasdaq the day after a session in dispersed order, where technology stocks suffered ahead of publications from Microsoft and Alphabet.

The title of Google’s parent company, whose advertising sales disappointed in the fourth quarter, fell by more than 6% in off-day trading on Wall Street.

Microsoft, which beat quarterly expectations amid the boom in artificial intelligence, lost 1% in after-hours trading due to concerns about the group’s rising AI costs.

The European new technologies sector lost 0.32%, notably STMicroelectronics (-0.59%) and ASML (-0.17%).

In other corporate news, Vivendi takes 0.92% after the approval by its supervisory board of the plan to split its activities.

In pharmaceuticals, Novo Nordisk rose 1.56% after publishing a fourth-quarter operating profit that was higher than expectations. GSK (-1.28%) and Novartis (-3.61%), on the other hand, fell after their respective results.

H&M, which surprised the market with a change of general manager, plunged 8.19%, at the bottom of the Stoxx 600. The world number two in fashion also reported a quarterly operating profit lower than foreseen.

Vodafone drops 3.06% after the group announced the rejection of Iliad’s revised proposal on the merger of their subsidiaries in Italy.

The Spanish banking group Santander (+1.4%) was driven by a 28% jump in its net profit in the fourth quarter. The European finance index gained 0.49%.

While digesting these results, investors are mainly waiting for the Fed’s monetary policy statement at 7:00 p.m. GMT, hoping to detect clues on the evolution of interest rates.

The yield on ten-year US Treasury bonds fell by almost five basis points, to 4.0222%, while the market is mainly counting on a first rate cut by the Fed in May.

That of the ten-year German Bund lost more than eight basis points, to 2.207% before the publication at 1:00 p.m. GMT of monthly inflation figures in Germany.

In France, inflation harmonized with European standards stood at 3.4% over one year in January compared to an anticipated increase of 3.3%.

(Written by Claude Chendjou, edited by Blandine Hénault)

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