At the beginning of the trading week investors got excited by one of those good old fashioned : Roche proposed to acquire InterMune for $8.3 billion while Burger King (+19.51% on Monday), the second largest fast food hamburger chain in the world, was said to be bidding for Canadian doughnut chain Tim Hortons (+19.26% on Monday). As Burger King, headquartered on 5505 Blue Lagoon Drive, Miami (almost sounds like a holiday destination no?), trademarked its flagship burgers as “whoppers” the deal sometimes was not surprisingly referred to as a whopper of a deal. At the end of the day it IS an $11.4 billion transaction. The S&P500 index closed the week at 2.003 points gaining some 0.75%. Ageas’s shares remained stable at EUR 25.55 (+0.04%). 

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This trading week also marked the end of the summer holiday for Belgian students who will be returning to the school benches on the 1 of September. Some of them are lucky and will be welcomed into a brand new building because on the 1 of September the first School of the ‘Schools of tomorrow’ project will be officially opened in Londerzeel. The Schools of tomorrow initiative is a public-private partnership of which the private partner is a joint venture between AG Real Estate, a subsidiary of AG Insurance, and BNP Paribas Fortis. The size and scope of this programme is pretty impressive: a total of 165 projects, including the construction and/or renovation of over 200 school buildings. But new building or not, the 1 September is always a bit special and we wish, both for the children as well as the parents, all the best on the first day of the new school year!