Europe midday: Shares rally despite German retail sales, CME outage

(Sharecast News) - European shares edged into positive territory on the final trading day of the month, with weaker-than-expected German retail sales weighing on sentiment while a power outage at a CME Group data centre brought trading in currencies, commodities and equities futures to a standstill.

The pan-regional Stoxx rose 0.11% to 575.64.92 points by 1208 GMT. Germany's DAX rallied by 0.14%, France's CAC 40 gained 0.19%, while Britain's FTSE 100 was up 0.23%.

"A mixed morning in Europe sees the FTSE 100 lead the way, pushing higher as the doubts and uncertainty around the budget clear. A raft of key datapoints have seen weak inflation figures out of both Italy (-0.2%) and France (-0.1%), seemingly paving the way for a similarly weak eurozone CPI figure next week," said Marketscope analyst Joshua Mahony.

"However, the big news has come from an unexpected outage at the CME, with a malfunction in their cooling systems impacting trade across a number of key commodities, treasuries, and index futures."

"The outage came at the same moment as a bullish breakout in silver, with the precious metal having just pushed into a fresh record high. Thus, with thin liquidity, we have seen a morning of volatility with early precious metal gains ultimately reversing while the CME attempt to get their systems back up and running. The question for the metal bulls is whether we see prices surge higher once the issue is resolved."

On the economics front, German retail sales unexpectedly fell in October, according to the Federal Statistical Office on Friday, marking the fifth decline over the past seven months.

Retail sales volumes were 0.3% lower last month, reversing a revised 0.3% increase in September and missing the 0.2% increase expected by analysts.

Food sales were 1.2% higher during October, offset by a 0.7% drop in non-food sales and a 0.6% fall in online and mail-order sales.

Meanwhile in France, inflation unexpectedly remained unchanged at 0.8% against forecasts of a rise to 1% in November, while Spain's eased less than expected to 3.1% compared with estimates of 3%.

In equities news, Delivery Hero shares surged on a report the German food delivery platform is considering selling or divesting parts of its business under pressure from several major shareholders.

Premier Inn-to-pubs owner Whitbread fell 5% as broker Bernstein slashed its price target and downgraded its rating to 'underperform' from 'outperform after the company revealed a hit from property taxes in the UK Budget delivered this week.

Reporting by Frank Prenesti for Sharecast.com