Athens this trading week: while temperatures outside rose to as high as 33°C, temperatures inside the meeting room between Greece and its creditors temperatures almost reached boiling point as Finance Ministers failed to agree. Tick Tock … the clock is ticking relentlessly towards the end of the month when the IMF debt needs to be repaid. Euro zone leaders plan to hold an emergency summit on Monday, the first working day of summer! I sincerely hope they will have air con in the meeting room. Looking at the CDS (Credit Default Swaps) on Bloomberg the market isn’t too optimistic, and things appear to be heating up as the probability of default is estimated to be at 79%. A year ago it was about 14% while on the first of January it was already at 42%.

Despite all of this, equity markets remained relatively cool as the Euro Stoxx 50 index lost 1.34%. Ageas’s shares retracted a bit more (1.67%) as Ageas’s shares have outperformed the Euro Stoxx 50 index by an impressive 8.3% since the 8th of May when Ageas published Q1 results. Since the beginning of the year Ageas’s shares have risen 14.4% while the Euro Stoxx is up 9.25%.