Grande Gipa
Record Gain Pushes Europe Stock Values to Highest in Four Years
By Alexis Xydias
May 5 (Bloomberg) -- April’s record rally in European stocks pushed market valuations to the highest level in more than four years as investors bet the first global recession since World War II is easing.
The 13 percent advance in the Dow Jones Stoxx 600 Index last month sent the measure to 16.2 times its companies’ earnings, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Forecasts for 2009 profit growth in the gauge fell to 18 percent on May 1 from 22 percent a month earlier, the biggest drop this year, after earnings declined 40 percent in 2008, according to data and analysts’ estimates compiled by Bloomberg.
Equities may rise more as investors who missed out on the last two months’ gains spend money on stocks 
, said Anders Lorentzen, a fund manager at DiBa Bank A/S in Naestved, Denmark. Allianz Global Investors and Societe Generale SA say
the rally may lose steam because Europe’s economy is forecast to contract by 4 percent this year and the market is being led by businesses with the highest debt and lowest returns on capital.
“We just went through this snapback that was like, ‘Whew, it’s not a depression,’” said Shigeki Makino, who oversees about $2 billion for Putnam Investments in Boston, about a third of it in Europe. “We could give back some of what we’ve gained, but if you look beyond the next three months, it seems you want to be long and not short equities.”
Two-Month Rally
Stocks rose in March and April, led by banks and mining companies, amid signs the economy may be getting worse. European unemployment jumped to a three-year high of 8.9 percent in March while lending to euro-region companies and households extended the worst drop since the data began 18 years ago, according to the European Union statistics office and the European Central Bank. The combined economy of the 16 countries sharing the euro will shrink 4 percent in 2009 and 0.1 percent in 2010, the European Commission said yesterday.
Investors who missed last month’s advance may start playing “catch-up” after the Stoxx 600 erased its 2009 loss on April 30, said Lorentzen, who helps oversee about $400 million.
Mutual funds were “so underweight shares that many haven’t participated in this rally,”
he said.
Flows to euro-zone equity funds in April were lower than in 96 percent of previous months over the past 12 years, according to Boston-based State Street Corp., the world’s third-largest custodian of assets.
Cost Cuts
Reducing expenses helped companies from Munich-based Siemens AG to BASF SE beat analysts’ profit estimates in the first quarter even as sales slumped. More than half of 132 companies in the Stoxx 600 that reported results from April 7 to April 30 exceeded analysts’ predictions, data compiled by Bloomberg show.
Siemens, Europe’s largest engineering company, reported a bigger-than-estimated increase in earnings on April 29, aided by faster cost-cutting programs. A day later, Ludwigshafen, Germany-based BASF posted profit that topped analysts’ projections after the world’s biggest chemical company shuttered factories to weather weaker demand.
Quarterly revenue at BASF fell 23 percent to 12.2 billion euros ($16 billion), missing the 13.4 billion euro estimate, according to forecasts compiled by Bloomberg.
‘Sales Disappointments’
Earnings that top projections “are disguising ongoing sales disappointments,” Andrew Lapthorne, part of the top- ranked Societe Generale strategy team in London, wrote in a report on May 1. Societe Generale ranked first in last year’s Thomson Extel survey for its equity strategy.
Lapthorne, a quantitative analyst, called the rise a “dash to trash” in an April 3 note, saying much of the advance was spurred by rebounds in the most battered shares and weakest companies financially.
The 67 companies in the Stoxx 600 with debt-to-equity ratios above 50 percent and a return on assets of less than zero added an average of 33 percent in April, data compiled by Bloomberg show. That was more than twice the increase for the European benchmark index.
“This is a painful rally, not driven by economic news, not driven by corporate earnings,” said Neil Dwane, who helps oversee $80 billion as Frankfurt-based chief investment officer for Europe at Allianz Global’s RCM unit. As for the shape of growth on a chart, “people are betting on a ‘V’-type of recovery in the economy, while I think it will be somewhere between a ‘U’ and an ‘L.’ I wouldn’t throw all the money into this market now,” Dwane said.
Investors who buy now will pay the highest prices relative to earnings in more than four years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The Stoxx 600’s valuation climbed to 17.9 times profits for the past 12 months at the end of April, the most expensive since September 2004. That was 1.39 times the price of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index in the U.S., the widest spread since 2003, the data show.
“The bounce we saw in the last six weeks can largely be explained by the fact that we came from an oversold level and that profits are not as bad as expected,” said Ad van Tiggelen, a The Hague, Netherlands-based senior strategist at ING Investment Management, which oversees the equivalent of $476 billion.
“A substantial further advance from these levels would only be justified if there would be a V-shaped economic recovery, which we don’t expect.” 