Europe midday: Shares drop sharply

(Sharecast News) - European stocks are trading sharply lower in the next-to-last session until month's end. That follows mixed earnings reports out of US tech heavyweights Alphabet and AMD overnight and a similarly mixed performance put in by Asian indices overnight.

As of 1310 BST the pan-European Stoxx 600 is trading lower by 1.34% to 511.06, whilst the French Cac-40 is off by 1.63% and the Italian FTSE Mib by 1.49%.

Brent crude futures were trading 1% higher, the euro and the yield on the benchmark 10-year Bund was roughly flat.

Yet gross domestic product growth figures for France, Germany, and Spain in the third quarter all beat economists' forecasts.

All told, economic activity across the euro area was ahead by 0.4% quarter-on-quarter over the three months to September (consensus: 0.2%).

However, economists at Oxford Economics cautioned that growth was "boosted by temporary factors" and "should not be taken as a sign of robust momentum."

Consumer price gains in Germany were reported at an annual rate of 2.4% for October (consensus: 2.1%) after a 1.8% print in September.

On the company side of things, Swiss investment bank UBS's shares gave back early gains to trade 4% lower despite posting quarterly income of $1.4bn that nearly doubled the consensus view.