Athens Exchange

Bank stocks led the Greek bourse to a day of healthy gains, with the benchmark climbing above the 610-point mark, although daily turnover still left much to be desired. After Thursday's European Union summit, traders are anticipating Friday's verdict on the Greek economy by Standard & Poor's and DBRS Morningstar.

Despite Wednesday's early gains at Athinon Avenue, in line with most eurozone bourses, the session ended with a relatively small increase on particularly low daily turnover, which points to the market's reservations about the economy's emergence from the coronavirus crisis, especially as far as the creation of new nonperforming loans for Greek lenders is concerned.

The dramatic slide in oil rates and some negative corporate developments, including QCM's report on Greek Nasdaq-listed firm Akazoo, saw local stocks heading south at the beginning of the week, with the credit sector losing more than 10 percent in a day.

After a mixed session that brought another trading week to an early close, bank stocks managed to drag the benchmark into negative territory during the closing auctions on Thursday, although the great majority of stocks recorded gains.

The pendulum at Athinon Avenue swung deep into the red on Wednesday, along with most other eurozone market, while traders had one eye fixed on the auction of the new seven-year bond. Thursday's session will be the last before the Easter holidays.

The Greek stock market returned to action after four days of recess with strong gains for most stocks on Tuesday on optimism that the worst of the coronavirus pandemic in Europe is over and oil prices will revert to stability after the recent agreement between oil-producing states. The late surge was bolstered by news that Greece is planning to tap the markets.

The bourse ended the trading week on Thursday with a mixed session - after some early gains - that concluded with losses for the benchmark and mid-caps slide while blue chips and a large number of other stocks headed higher.

Bank stocks and Ellaktor helped the benchmark at Athinon Avenue retain a fraction of its midsession gains on Wednesday, while many other eurozone bourses ended up in the red after two days of growth. Thus the Greek market made it three rising sessions in succession.

Tuesday's trading session at Athinon Avenue, which closed without any news from the Eurogroup meeting, continued along Monday's growth path, taking the stock market's gains to 4.3 billion euros in capitalization terms from the start of the week as the benchmark has rebounded by almost 12.4 percent in total. This has been accompanied by a fresh decline in bond yields.

The mixed session that brought the bourse week to a close on Friday saw the benchmark and blue chips record losses, while the mid-cap index advanced and rising stocks outnumbers losers at a ratio of almost two-to-one, on what was the lowest daily turnover of the last eight sessions.