Delta variant, lockdown fears, rising inflation, a usually dreary stock market month of August – and yet investors cheerfully took hold of stocks on Friday. The fear of missing the train seemed too great. The noted with 16 030 points Dax higher than ever before. By the close of trading, the leading index gave up part of its profits and went 0.3 percent higher at 15,977 points from trading. Driven by price gains at Zooplus, the S-Dax small cap index rose by 1.4 percent and thus also set a new record. Some investors have recently held back in the hope of more favorable purchase prices and are now under pressure, said Thomas Altmann from asset manager QC Partners. Fund managers can quickly find it difficult to explain to their clients if they are not keeping pace with the market. Others see the breakout of the Dax to highs after the search for direction in the past few weeks as a fundamentally positive signal. So they continued to add to their equity positions.
After the sale of the sporting goods brand Reebok, investors joined Adidas. The group wants to distribute part of the proceeds to its own shareholders, as a dividend or in the form of a share buyback. Adidas shares rose by 2.3 percent, making them the biggest DAX winner. At the top of the M-Dax, the shares of Gea rose by 1.7 percent. The machine and plant manufacturer presented final quarterly figures. Above all, however, the announced share buyback program was the driving force. At Varta there were long faces after growth figures. Papers from the Apple supplier collapsed by a good ten percent. “The pandemic struck last year in the second quarter and everyone bought the new AirPods Pro like crazy. So from a market perspective there wasn’t much room for further growth,” said Robert-Jan van der Horst, analyst at Warburg Research.
There was a price explosion at the online pet supplies retailer Zooplus after a takeover offer. The papers jumped in the S-Dax by 41 percent to 392 euros. The US financial investor Hellman & Friedman is offering 390 euros in cash per Zooplus share.
There were new records on the US stock exchanges. Both the Dow Jones as well as the S & P-500 reached highs in the meantime.