The MSE Equity Price Index on Tuesday erased most of Monday's gains as it retraced by 0.31% to 3,926.229 points. The decline in BOV outweighed the gain in MPC whilst RS2 traded flat. Meanwhile, overall trading activity eased to €0.08 from €0.12 million yesterday.
Malta Properties Company plc rose by 3.7% to the €0.56 level across heightened activity of 116,928 points. MPC’s Annual General Meeting is scheduled to be held remotely on Thursday 15 July 2021.
Bank of Valletta plc slipped by 2.7% as it returned to the €0.90 level on 6,188 shares.
Meanwhile, the ordinary shares of RS2 Software plc closed unchanged at the €1.79 level across a single trade of 4,000 shares.
On Tuesday, GO plc announced an investment of €25 million in a third submarine cable, which has been named as ‘LaValette’. This forms part of the global PEACE System (Pakistan East Africa Connecting Europe) project – a multi-million-euro connectivity effort which consists of a submarine cable connecting countries across the globe on its way from Asia to France. GO’s part of this global network directly connects Malta to France, Egypt, and beyond, making GO the first operator in Malta to have additional redundancy on international connectivity to another country other than Italy.
The RF MGS Index advanced for the first time in three sessions as it inched 0.04% higher to 1,098.988 points. Today, the German Consumer Price Index (‘CPI’) for the month of June was confirmed at 2.3% when compared to the same period last year, easing from the decade high of 2.5% recorded in May.
Similarly, the French CPI reached 1.5% in June in line with expectations. Recent inflation data will remain a hot topic during the European Central Bank’s (‘ECB’) next monetary policy meeting scheduled for next week, as policymakers are expected to hold their first discussion since they last week launched a unanimously agreed new strategy, which changes the way the bank sets monetary policy for the first time since 2003.
The decision on when to start winding down the ECB’s pandemic stimulus programme will be a crucial test of the bank’s new strategy in the coming months.
Meanwhile in the US, the CPI for June increased by 5.4% from a year ago, well above the forecasted 5.0%. Inflation in the US has been escalating for a number of factors, including supply chain bottlenecks, labour shortages, high commodity prices, pent-up demand following easing of pandemic related restrictions, and year-on-year comparisons with a time when the economic activity was subdued.