The European Commission, concerned about the European Union's loss of competitiveness compared to China and the United States, has long been repeating a mantra to reverse the situation: EU citizens need to invest more and have the means to do so.

The average compensation that directors of companies listed on the stock exchange receive for the termination of their contractual relationship stood at 3.7 million euros last year. The amount, far exceeded by some multi-million euro settlements, especially in companies on the Ibex, the major stock market benchmark, is extremely far from the average of 9,000 euros received by laid-off workers. In any case, there is a lot of variability depending on the sectors, from about 2,400 euros in hospitality to more than 32,000 in banking and the financial sector, according to data from the Ministry of Labor.

After starring in a certain withdrawal, families are once again entrusting their savings to the stock market. Last year, the weight of households in the Spanish stock market rose to 16.7%, the highest level in the last four years, according to Bolsas y Mercados (BME), the operator of the Spanish trading floors, a subsidiary of the Swiss firm Six. Its historical low occurred in 2024. Another relevant fact is that foreign investors accounted for a historical record of 50.4% of the total.

Yesterday a friend told me: "The Ibex-35 has risen 13% this year, but there are several companies that have fallen 30%. I'm going to buy them, it's their turn now." Will my friend be right? Probably not.

The Spanish stock exchange operator BME allows Holaluz to list on the stock exchange again from tomorrow, Tuesday. The Catalan company will rejoin the BME Growth market – the stock market for SMEs – once the ministry's procedure for Ecological Transition, which could have resulted in its disqualification as an energy marketer, has been archived.

The fast fashion giant Shein is preparing for one of the most anticipated stock market debuts, although it is doing so far from its best days. After frustrated attempts to land on the London and New York stock exchanges – mainly due to doubts from Beijing regulators – the Singapore-based Chinese company will begin trading this Tuesday on the Hong Kong stock exchange.

The stock market entries of the two competitors leading the race of commercial artificial intelligence – Anthropic (Claude) and OpenAI (ChatGPT)– are touching. While the market entry of Dario Amodei's leading company is assumed to occur this fall, Sam Altman's tech company "will be a listed company in 2027, or even sooner", according to the company's chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, as reported last Wednesday in a meeting with employees.

The fashion e-commerce portal Shein presented this Monday on the Hong Kong stock exchange the conditions for its initial public offering. The platform expects to raise up to 1.513 billion euros, on a valuation of 23.122 billion, a substantially lower amount than the peaks recorded in 2022. At that time, shortly after a boom in e-commerce driven by the pandemic, the company founded in China, but headquartered in Singapore, was close to 100 billion dollars in value, about 85.6 billion euros.

Chinese robot manufacturer Unitree has debuted on the Shanghai stock exchange – on the STAR market, popularly known as the Chinese Nasdaq – with a 460% revaluation of its shares. At the close of Wednesday's session, the company's stock reached 845 yuan (108 euros), more than quintupling the initial amount of 150.8 yuan (19.3 euros) set in its initial public offering.

The artificial intelligence has been the engine of stock market success in recent years. The tech companies leading the AI market have reached unimaginable heights, to the point where the club of companies worth more than a trillion dollars is no longer an exclusive affiliation. Nvidia exceeds $5 trillion in market capitalization, while both Alphabet (Google) and Apple are above four trillion.

Grifols' results evolution has served to reduce tension among investors, who have not fully calmed down since the publication of the Gotham City Research report against the Catalan company in January 2024. The share price of the plasma-derived medicines giant remains far from the levels it held before the attack, but the good performance of its accounts has been enough to question some of the most critical theses regarding its value. Among them, those of some of the short-selling investors who had accumulated positions in the company's capital, and who have been reducing or withdrawing them in recent months.

The Ibex-35, the main Spanish stock market index, broke the 20,000-point barrier for the first time this Tuesday. The index of the country's large companies thus culminates the chain of records it has been linking throughout 2026. At the close of the session, it only needed a moderate acceleration – of 0.21%, already outside of trading hours – to rise above historic highs and end the day above 20,023 points.

The largest Chinese chip manufacturer, Changxin Memory Technologies (CXMT), debuted this Monday on the Shanghai stock exchange, marking the second-largest IPO in the Asian giant's history. At the close of the session, the company's shares had appreciated by 466%, almost multiplying its initial quotation by six. Early on Monday, the technology company's shares had a unit price of 8.66 yuan (1.12 euros), while at the end of the day their value rose to 49.5 yuan (6.41 euros).

After a few days of calm and records, turbulence returns to the stock markets. The announcement by the US President, Donald Trump, that the ceasefire with Iran is over has caused an avalanche of sales and declines in all European stock exchanges.

The Catalan company for auxiliary tourism and travel services ByteTravel has debuted on the SME stock exchange, BME Growth, after almost two years listed on BME Scaleup. It is the second company to make the leap from one market to another. The stock market debut began with an increase, reaching 4.84 euros, with an increment of 7.56% and a capitalization of almost 135 million. The company's CEO, Axel Serena, rang the traditional bell at the Barcelona Stock Exchange, accompanied by the managing director of BME Growth and BME Scaleup, Jesús González Nieto, and the president of the Barcelona Stock Exchange, Fausto Agelet.

The president of the National Securities Market Commission (CNMV), Carlos San Basilio, has argued that the Spanish stock market should grow in listed companies and diversification. "We should have an Ibex-50, with companies with high capitalization and liquidity, and that could be a market as diversified as possible," he stated during his intervention at the summer course of the UIMP and APIE held this week in Santander.

Elon Musk seeks to break down the doors of Wall Street. In an update to the IPO prospectus of his technology giant, SpaceX, the world's richest man has specified that it will issue 555 million shares at a unit price of $135. In this way, Musk's space and artificial intelligence insignia seeks to add about $75 billion to its capital, an amount that would consolidate it as the largest initial public offering (IPO, the technical name for a company's stock market debut) in history, surpassing that of the oil company Saudi Aramco in 2019, which raised just over $29 billion.

The war has begun and Elon Musk has fired first. The mega IPO of SpaceX, the all-encompassing technology company of the world's richest man, has opened the doors of Wall Street to generative AI. Although it is known for its rockets and defense contracts, SpaceX has housed xAI since February of this year, the company within the South African's conglomerate that manages its consumer artificial intelligence, the chatbot integrated into the X social network, Grok. Musk's public offering sets the path for the rest of the sector: a historically high capitalization target —$1.75 trillion— and billions raised to add to the immense computing investments that will be needed to cover growing demand. Following behind are Anthropic, the creator of Claude, which has the fourth quarter marked in red, and OpenAI, of ChatGPT, which left behind the legal problems with Musk and already has a clear path to join the New York stock exchange.

The distrust of investors with Grifols once again punishes the company's stock during earnings season. After the Catalan pharmaceutical company published its quarterly accounts at the close of Thursday's market, with a 22% increase in profit, up to 73 million euros, it opened Friday's stock session in a clear downward trend. Around twenty minutes to eleven in the morning, the Catalan multinational's shares are the worst in the selective index, with a decrease of more than 4%. Around midday, however, the analysis firm Moody's improved its assessment of the company's debt, painting a positive immediate future. With this new reading, the stock has rebounded slightly. After one in the afternoon, it lowered the value by about 2%, to 8.98 euros.

The Spanish defense and technology company Indra has begun trading on the stock market this Wednesday with an increase, hours after the departure from the shareholding of Escribano Mechanical & Engineering (EM&E) was announced, the company of brothers Ángel and Javier Escribano, who until Tuesday controlled 14.5% of the capital.