You may remember Doris Day singing the famous song written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, “Que sera sera” in the Hitchcock movie “The man who knew too much”. Well, this could illustrate the market’s sentiment this week vis-à-vis the Catalan political crisis. Despite the turmoil it created and some mixed announcements from the International Monetary Fund, optimism seems to have prevailed this week. A number of major indices, such as Dow Jones and S&P 500, hit new records on Wednesday and Asian stocks reached a 10-year high on Thursday. In Belgium, the BEL 20 also rose to its highest level since the crisis closing at over 4070 on Thursday. For Ageas, the weekly gain was more limited (+0.1%) but the year to date performance of the share stands at 7%.

Even in Turkey, where political tensions with the US led on Monday to the suspension of visa processing between the two countries, the stock market remained positively oriented. The Borsa Istanbul 100 (BIST 100) recovered quickly after a 3% dip on Monday. In fact, the Turkish stock market has been highly dynamic since the beginning of the year with gains from the BIST 100 amounting to 36%. The share price of AKsigorta, the listed Non-Life insurer in which Ageas has a 36% stake, mirrored this trend, showing a 33% increase since the 1Of course this market trend has to be appreciated in the context of double digit inflation in the country: in September Turkey's annualised inflation rate was as high as 11.2%.

On Wednesday, during the annual meeting of the IMF with the World Bank, Tobias Adrian, director of the monetary and capital markets department at the IMF, applauded the strengthening of the global financial system, stating that: “ Here at Ageas we could not agree more. Indeed, we do work continuously on improving our capital structure, solving legacies and adapting ourselves to a changing environment.

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This week our black-out period started ahead of the publication of our 3Q17 results planned on the 8 of November.