Europe midday: Stocks edge into the green, helped by progress in US-China trade talks

Stocks on the Continent are moving into the green shortly after the midpoint of the session with shares of Basic Resources companies and lenders' trading places even as, at least for now, global growth concerns appear to abate.

Overnight, Reuters reported that Beijing had made unprecedented proposals in talks with Washington on areas including forced technology transfers.

But the lack of any clear result from the latest round of voting in the UK Parliament, on Wednesday evening, had underwhelmed some traders, although others continued to express confidence that a "constructive" outcome lay ahead.

Echoing the above, strategists at Barclays told clients: "The global slowdown has been sharper and longer than expected [...] This dynamic should improve in the coming months, helped by policy stimulus in China; the fading of one-off effects in the US; modest fiscal easing in Europe; and, we believe, constructive outcomes on US-China trade and Brexit negotiations.

"Led by the Fed’s sharp turn, central banks have tilted from normalisation back to reflation. They are unlikely to reverse course again anytime soon, given below-target inflation (ECB, BoJ) and a seemingly higher tolerance for modest overshoots (Fed)."

Against that backdrop, as of 1132 GMT, the benchmark Stoxx 600 was drifting lower by 0.03% to 377.11, alongside a drop of 0.72% on the FTSE Mibtel to 21,041.04, although the German Dax was up by 0.01% to 11,419.80.

From a sector standpoint, the Stoxx 600's sector gauge for Basic Resources was adding 0.79% to 466.60, but that for lenders' shares was down by 1.0% to 138.33.

Weighing on the latter, Deutsche Bank stock was trading lower on the back of reports that it might raise as much as €10bn to finance its tie-up with Commerzbank, with Swedbank shares down again after it fired its chief executive officer in the wake of the recent money laundering allegations that had engulfed the lender.

In parallel, front month Brent crude oil futures were down by 1.21% to $67.02 a barrel on the ICE.

Meanwhile, Sterling was off by 0.49% versus the pound at 1.1682 following a slate of so-called indicative votes the night before in the UK Parliament which, in the words of Jasper Lawler, head of research at LCG, had "indicated little".

Nevertheless, while some traders were venting their frustration at the lack of a clear result, Lawler interpreted the market reaction in foreign exchange markets as indicating that those votes might be but the latest act playing out in the ongoing Brexit drama.

"The fact that the pound continues to hover around the $1.32 mark shows that despite the bedlam, pound traders are still confident that a no deal Brexit will be avoided in two weeks' time," Lawler told clients in an early morning note.

The latest batch of economic data out of the Eurozone was mixed.

According to the European Central Bank, the rate of growth in euro area money supply picked up from a pace of 2.5% for January to 2.8% in February.

However, the European Commission's euro area economic sentiment covering the month of March fell to 105.0, versus 105.4 in the month before, amid a much sharper than expected deterioration in a gauge of industrial confidence.