By Twesha Dikshit<\/p>\n
May 7 (Reuters) – European shares were steady on Thursday after a sharp rally in the previous session, as investors assessed the prospects of a U.S.-Iran peace deal \u200cand digested a slew of corporate earnings.<\/p>\n
The pan-European STOXX 600 was little changed at 623.59 \u200cpoints, as of 0810 GMT. Most major regional bourses traded higher, with France’s CAC 40 up 0.3%, while London’s FTSE 100 \u200bfell 0.5%.<\/p>\n
The European benchmark’s rally on Wednesday left it about 2% below levels seen before the start of the Middle East war. Energy-dependent European markets have lagged global peers since the conflict began, while AI-driven optimism has boosted other major indexes to record highs.<\/p>\n
U.S. President Donald Trump predicted a swift end to the war \u200cas Tehran considered a U.S. peace proposal \u2060that is expected to end the conflict while leaving Iran’s nuclear programme and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz unresolved.<\/p>\n
“Regardless of the back and forth, it’s \u2060the closest that the U.S. and Iran have been to potentially getting a peace deal and that’s what’s driving the positive momentum in markets this morning,” said Daniela Hathorn, senior market analyst at Capital.com.<\/p>\n
“There’s been hardly any \u200binstances \u200bwhere the U.S. stock market has been trading with \u200ba bearish bias, whereas for Europe throughout the \u200csecond half of (April), it’s been a continuous bearish bias on the back of worsening talks.”<\/p>\n
Oil major Shell dipped 3.9% after it reported first-quarter profit that beat expectations, but reduced the pace of its quarterly share buyback programme. Peer BP was down 1.8%, while the energy index fell 1.2%.<\/p>\n
Luxury shares gained 2.5% after being under pressure this year. LVMH, Hermes and Kering were up between 2.5% and 2.9%.<\/p>\n
Spirits group Campari \u200ctumbled 11% after the Italian firm’s first-quarter revenue was below \u200bexpectations. Peers Diageo and Pernod Ricard lost over 1%, while \u200bthe beverages index dropped 1.1%.<\/p>\n
Euro zone financial \u200bintegration has made steady progress in the past few years but the region’s equity \u200cmarkets remain fragmented, the European Central Bank \u200bsaid in a report.<\/p>\n
Among other \u200bmovers, Rheinmetall shares dropped 3.1%. The German defence firm reported first-quarter results and said it had submitted a bid to buy German Naval Yards Kiel.<\/p>\n
Persil maker Henkel jumped 4% after the \u200bGerman firm met sales expectations for \u200cthe first quarter.<\/p>\n
Shares of Siemens Healthineers tumbled 3.7% after the medical-tech company cut its full-year \u200boutlook due to structural changes in the Chinese market and pronounced inflation expectations.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by \u200bTwesha Dikshit; Editing by Harikrishnan Nair and Sonia Cheema)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Twesha Dikshit May 7 (Reuters) – European shares were steady on Thursday after a sharp rally in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":34202,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13078,66,15,483,13091,22770],"class_list":{"0":"post-34201","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-europe","8":"tag-corporate-earnings","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-european","11":"tag-european-markets","12":"tag-european-shares","13":"tag-iran39s-nuclear-programme"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34201\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}