DAX down 0.3%, Bayer up more than 6%, and Apple's best year met a margin forecast

Frankfurt did not wait for America. By about 16:08 CET the DAX stood at 25,913.40, down 0.27% on the day³, having touched 25,677.86 in the morning¹; Monday’s close was 25,981.09¹. Xetra’s official close comes at 17:30, after this was written. The Stoxx Europe 600 was 0.4% lower at 647.13 by mid-morning, with technology the heaviest drag, down 1.6%, STMicro and ASML lower, as worries about AI valuations and fresh US strikes on Iran’s Qeshm Island kept buyers cautious².

The exception was the dullest kind of good news. Bayer raised its full-year guidance for core profit (EBITDA before special items) to €9.8bn–€10.3bn, from €9.6bn–€10.1bn, on the back of an 8% rise in pharmaceutical sales, and the shares were up more than 6% in afternoon trading³. Two drugs, Nubeqa and Kerendia, grew 58.3% and 64.9% after adjustments³. A turnaround is not a speech. It is a column of prescriptions that keeps getting longer.

New York opened split in two. In the first hour the Dow was down 0.3%, the S&P 500 up 0.2% and the Nasdaq up 0.5%, as chip stocks recovered from a rough few days⁴. Apple fell more than 2% after its first report under its new chief executive, John Ternus: revenue beat estimates, but iPad sales missed and the margin forecast disappointed, with higher memory costs named as the main pressure⁵. Palantir fell even though revenue nearly doubled; the market looked past the quarter at the contracts behind it (see the ePaper)⁵.

The lesson for you is an old one. A company can have, as Ternus put it, its “best fiscal year ever” and still go down, because the price already counted on it⁵. Nothing here is investment advice.