The black Monday of the markets has not spared any price list. Even the US Stock Exchanges, after an uncertain start, decidedly took the downward path in the afternoon: the Dow Jones and the S&P 500 lost (-1,1%), the Nasdaq did worse (-1,7%) which the euphoria of Linkedin's debut boom is now over (-4,7%). The trend of the US markets accentuated the negative trend which, throughout the session, dominated the European lists. Apparently the black jersey goes to Milan, down by 3,2%. But, if the coupon effect is taken into account (i.e. the detachment of the dividend of 64 listed companies), the effective loss is reduced to a more modest 1,4%, in any case below the losses of London (1,7%) Frankfurt and Paris (both down by 1,9%). In short, the impact of the S&P warning was less strong than expected, as indeed happened on Wall Street after the similar warning for US debt. From Manhattan to Tokyo, passing through the Old Continent, the reasons for a day marked by widespread declines are the same: 1) the growing tensions on European sovereign debt; 2) the slowdown of the Chinese locomotive, which emerges from the slowdown in the manufacturing PMI index.
It was not easy to imagine a more turbulent setting for the launch of Banca Intesa's 5 billion capital increase. The system bank, also damaged by the strong discount of the similar Commerzbank operation launched at the same time, suffered a drop of 2,81%, after intense trading on rights which soon fell into line with respect to an initial theoretical value, which it provided for a premium of 1,8 times the title. In reality, rights quotations quickly aligned on the downside. After the first trades around 0,1020, prices aligned around a low of 0,90-0,91 (-22%) on the wave of high volumes (441 million pieces), which reflect a value unit of Intesa (which yesterday detached the dividend) around 1,7 euro. The easy prediction of a strong volatility in the prices of rights destined to roller coaster fluctuations is confirmed, which is not displeased by a group of professional (and non-professional) traders. Even if on the ups and downs of the rights (for now more downhill than uphill) it is very easy to get burned.
The target practice of speculation on Intesa has not extended much to the rest of the banking sector. At least as regards values, see Unicredit (-0,5%), which has no operations in the pipeline or others, see Banco Popolare (-0,7%) which have their capital increase behind them. On the other hand, the loss for the managed companies Mediolanum (-2,79%) and Azimut (-2,09%) was heavy, meanwhile Fiat (-2,9%) and Industrial (-3,3%) paid the difficult day for industrial stocks all over the world, in the wake of the slowdown in global demand which did not spare stocks such as Caterpillar (-3,1%) or General Electric (-2,3%) not to mention the massive losses suffered by stocks Japanese more oriented towards exports to China. And so, while Parmalat's price on the first day of the tender offer remained firmly anchored to the values of the Lactalis offer (2,6 euros), the positive notes are very few. Among these, the case of Atlantia stands out, which practically recovered the detachment of the coupon in just one morning.
