At the beginning of the new stock market year, the Dax rose above the well-noticed mark of 14,000 points. The leading German index gained 1.05 percent on Monday to 14,069.26 points. The Dax shook off the weakness from the end of last year, but remained in the range of the past few weeks between 13,800 and 14,200 points.
In 2022, the stock market barometer had lost around twelve percent in view of the Ukraine war, high energy prices, high inflation overall and rising key interest rates – it was the weakest year since 2018.
Since, in addition to Wall Street, which sets the tone, the stock exchanges in Great Britain, Zurich, China, Hong Kong and Japan, among others, remained closed, trading was relatively calm and with little volume. The MDax rose by 1.43 percent to 25,475.53 points on Monday. The index of medium-sized German companies collapsed by around 28 percent last year.
Danger of a recession as a burden
Investors are now hoping “for a better stock market year in 2023,” wrote market observer Thomas Altmann from QC Partners. However, the economic and political risks and stress factors are still there. Market expert Stephen Innes from SPI Asset Management pointed out that the reasons for the high inflation still exist. Analyst Jochen Stanzl from the trading house CMC Markets meanwhile sees less inflation than the risk of a recession as a burden in 2023.
Among the individual values, the shares of Rheinmetall continued the strong previous year thanks to a major order: With a plus of 5.9 percent, the papers of the armaments group and automotive supplier secured second place in the MDax. Last year, the focus was on the arms business, which benefited from higher defense spending in the wake of the Ukraine war. The group has now received an order worth more than a quarter billion euros from a German premium car manufacturer for switching protection parts in electric cars.
According to stock market expert Andreas Lipkow, the car shares, which were rather reviled in 2022, benefited overall from hopes of a possible economic recovery in the second half of the year. Continental shares in the Dax gained 5.6 percent.
In addition, investors also grabbed some of the losers in the real estate and online retail sectors last year, as illustrated by the price premiums at Vonovia and Zalando of 4.0 and 5.8 percent, respectively. According to stockbrokers, investors now see greater opportunities for values that they had avoided until recently.
The laboratory supplier Sartorius, whose shares had already been among the biggest Dax losers in 2022, lost almost seven percent at the end of the Dax. The Göttingen-based company wants to make acquisitions again in the coming years. At the weekend, company boss Joachim Kreuzburg also told the German Press Agency that the shortage of skilled workers had meanwhile expanded into a labor shortage, which is also a challenge for Sartorius.
