Europe close: Stockmarkets dip amid mixed news on trade

Stocks on the Continent dipped at the start of the week amid mixed news around the ongoing US-China trade talks and after the International Monetary Fund took an axe to its growth forecasts for Germany.

On Saturday, the US President said it was "false" that America might soon lift its tariffs on Chinese-made goods, although his remarks had a positive edge in overall terms, with Donald Trump going on to say that "[negotiations are] going well. I would say about as well as it could possibly go."

For its part, in afternoon trading the IMF trimmed its forecasts for global GDP growth in 2019 and 2020, chiefly due to downwards revisions to its projections for Germany and Turkey.

Analysts appeared to retain a positive bias, with Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets UK, telling clients: "There appears to be much more cautious optimism than we saw at the end of 2018, helped in some part by a more cautious Federal Reserve, while corporate earnings, despite not being great, they haven't been particularly disappointing either."

By the end of trading, the benchmark Stoxx 600 was down by 0.19% or 0.69 points to 356.36, alongside a drop of 0.62% or 69.34 points to 11,136.20 on the German Dax, while the FTSE Mibtel gave back 0.35% or 69.42 points to close at 19,638.64.

To take note of, US markets were closed on Monday, in observance of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

Nevertheless, investors appeared to overlook a better-than-expected batch of economic data out of China, with GDP growth printing at up by 6.5% year-on-year in the fourth quarter of 2018, while figures on industrial value-added and retail sales beat economists' expectations - although data on fixed asset investment disappointed.

With more negative implications, perhaps, reports on Monday morning indicated that little progress was made in talks between Beijing and Washington at the start of the month on enforcing intellectual property laws in the Asian giant as well as regarding the forced transfer of technology from foreign companies to their Chinese rivals.

On the euro area economic front meanwhile, Germany's Federal Office of Statistics reported a larger-than-expected slowdown in factory gate inflation for the month of December.

Producer prices reportedly fell by 0.4% month-on-month, dragging the annual rate of increase from 3.3% to 2.7% (consensus: 2.9%).