Europe midday: Stocks track gains on Wall Street, trade and geopolitics in focus

Stocks on the Continent are trading slightly higher on the back of the record highs reached by Wall Street's main market gauges on the day before, but with US markets closed on Thursday in observance of the 4 July holiday, many traders were in fact absent from their desks.

In the background, there were somewhat positive reports around progress in US-China trade talks and perhaps even as regarded the stand-off with Iran.

"A calm has descended across Europe as expected now that Independence Day has arrived. The Dow and S&P 500 came within a whisker of 27,000 and 3,000 respectively," said IG's chief market analyst Chris Beauchamp.

"European markets have been left running on fumes however with the US out of the picture, a situation not helped by the absence of economic data from the scene as well."

As of noon, the benchmark Stoxx 600 was essentially unchanged at 392.57, alongside a 0.50% rise to 22,016.65 for the FTSE Mibtel while the Dax was edging up by 0.02% to 12,618.43.

Overnight US National Economic Council director, Larry Kudlow said US and Chinese trade officials "will be on the phone this coming week", Bloomberg reported.

Nevertheless, on Thursday morning, a Chinese Commerce Ministry spokesman said the US would have to lift its punitive tariffs in order to reach a deal.

Dampening sentiment perhaps, also overnight the US President accused the euro area and China of artificially weakening their currencies versus the US dollar.

On another front, Iranian state news agency IRNA cited the country's top intelligence official, Mahmoud Alavi, as saying that Tehran could only hold talks with Washington if the US ended its sanctions and if the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei consented.

But, Alavi continued: "Americans were scared of Iran's military power, that is the reason behind their decision to abort the decision to attack Iran."

The flow of economic news was thin and what was to be had was rather lacklustre.

According to Eurostat, retail sales within the single currency bloc shrank at a 0.3% month-on-month pace in May (consensus: 0.4%), following a downwardly revised dip of 0.1% in the month before.