Monday August 3, 2015

// August 3rd, 2015 // Daily News

Greek stock market trades 17% lower after reopening

CNBC.com

The Athens stock exchange was trading around 17 percent lower around midday on Monday, after falling nearly 23 percent after it reopened for the first time in five weeks.
Greek banking stocks were the worst hit with Alpha Bank, Attica Bank and Eurobank Ergasius, Bank of Piraeus and the National Bank of Greece were all trading at or around 30 percent lower – the daily volatility limit. Similar losses were seen in other stocks outside of the banking industry too.
There was further bad news for the Greek economy earlier, with flash manufacturing PMI figures for July down to 30.2 the lowest reading since Markit began compiling data in 1999.
To make matters worse, an economic sentiment index for Greece hit its lowest level since October 2012 in July with capital controls and political uncertainty weighing on sentiment, according to the IOBE think tank that conducted the survey.
Ahead of the much-anticipated open, traders were bracing themselves for a day of “losses and volatility.”
Greek traders told Reuters on Sunday that they expected a torrid day of losses when the stock market opened. Takis Zamanis, chief trader at Beta Securities, told the news agency that “the possibility of seeing even a single share rise in tomorrow’s session is almost zero.”
Meanwhile, the chairman of the Hellenic Capital Markets Commission told CNBC ahead of the open that his commission would monitor the market closely on Monday.
“We are not participants in the market, we are the supervisors and we are waiting to see what happens,” Kostas Botopoulos told CNBC Europe’s “Squawk Box” Monday. “It’s very important that we’re opening, of course we expect pressure on the Greek stock market but we’ll be there to monitor what happens.”
He said there would be no state intervention into the market, saying: “We’re looking to see when it will stabilize, at which prices, and what the perception of the Greek market is from domestic and foreign investors.”
Focus for the day is likely to be on the losses among Greek banking stocks, which constitute around 20 percent of the main Athens index. Restrictions have been put in place to stem capital flight, however.
Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at currency trading platform OANDA, said the banks would be key for investors.
“The Greek stock market is likely to suffer significant losses today, led by the banks which have been hit considerably by the events of this year and now need to be recapitalized at the very least,” he said in a note Monday.

The rules

Local investors will face restrictions that reflect the continuing capital controls on Greek banks that limit withdrawals to 60 euros a day. This means that domestic investors can only buy shares with fresh money from abroad or cash they have to hand, Reuters reported last week. They can also buy shares with money coming from security sales or dividends or cash remaining with their security firms.
Foreign investors may trade freely, however.
The reopen comes after a prolonged period of financial uncertainty in Greece. The stock market shut when capital controls were imposed on Greek banks at the end of June, when it looked increasingly likely that Greece was about to go bankrupt and leave the euro zone.
An eleventh-hour deal between the Greek government and lenders over a third bailout program for Greece worth 86 billion euros was agreed, however, pulling the country back from the brink of an unprecedented “Grexit” from the single currency union. Greek banks then reopened on July 20.
Although the finer details of a bailout are still being hammered out between lenders, the country is deemed to have stabilized enough for the stock market to reopen. Market analysts warned that Monday was likely to be a day of losses, however.
“While it would be easy to suggest that today’s reopening of the Greek stock market is a key step on the road to some form of normalization, it is likely to be anything but,” according to Michael Hewson, chief markets analysts at CMC Markets, who warned of “volatility and losses.”

Today’s Inspiration

Practice Makes Perfect

by Joyce Meyer – posted August 03, 2015

Make me understand the way of Your precepts; so shall I meditate on and talk of Your wondrous works.
– Psalm 119:27

Mark 4:24 says the amount of time you give to the Word will determine the amount of knowledge and virtue that comes back to you. As humans, we can be rather lazy, and many people want to get something for nothing (with no effort on their part); however, according to this Scripture, that is not the way it works.

If you want to do what the Word of God says and tap into the full power available to you, you will have to spend time reading the Word, meditating on it, pondering and contemplating it, talking about it, and rehearsing and practicing it in your thinking.

Remember the old saying “Practice makes perfect”? We don’t expect to be experts at other things in life without a lot of study, so why would we expect living the Christian life to be any different?

Power Thought: I study the Word of God so I can learn God’s ways.

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