May the force be with you

If you’re a Georges Lucas’ fan, you may know that last Friday, May the 4th, was Star Wars Day. What started as a play on words based on the catch line "May the force (May the 4th) be with you", was allegedly used for the first time in 1979 in an ad published in the London Evening News on the 4th of May when Margaret Thatcher took office. It was stating: "May the Fourth be with you, Maggie.”

So if you have not missed a single movie from the famous Jedi saga, Friday was your day!

But it was not Good Doctor’s day as the Chinese healthcare and technology company did not make as strong a debut as expected on the Hong Kong stock exchange, ending instead its first trading day flat. This came as a surprise as the IPO of this spin-off of Ping An* has been a huge success, making it the largest in Hong-Kong this year. Despite the fact that Good Doctor’s activity - operating an healthcare platform which offers online consultations to millions of patients - is not profitable yet, its IPO has been oversubscribed more than 600 times, attracting a lot of interest from retail investors and rising no less than HK$8.8bn (EUR 0.9 bn). This listing was probably closely monitored by the Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi which filed a prospectus on Thursday to launch a $10 billion IPO, the biggest since Alibaba.

But, in Europe, the force seems to have been with the equities market last week as the Stoxx 600 enjoyed its sixth straight week of gains, its longest winning streak this year, while Ageas’s shares hit a fresh nine-year high on Thursday, breaking the EUR 45.00 threshold, before slightly receding and ending the week up 1.4% at EUR 44.67, still strongly outperforming the sector (Stoxx Insurance -0.3%).

* Ping An holds a 5.17% stake in the share capital of Ageas.