Markets, Business & Tech Briefing: PSI Gains 0.4%, BCP Leads Under the Board's Biggest Short, a €393 Million Debt Closes at €57,800

August Ends Green, and the Most-Shorted Stock on the Board Leads It

The PSI (Portuguese Stock Index) closed Friday, 28 August, at 9,430.91 points, up 0.44% and comfortably above the level we expected. Yesterday we forecast a quiet, slightly negative session drifting back toward 9,350. It was quiet, and it was not negative: the index put on roughly 42 points and closed the last trading day of August on the front foot.

Eight of the sixteen members rose, two were unchanged and six fell, and this time the weight sat on the right side of the ledger. BCP, or Banco Comercial Português, led at plus 1.17% to €1.12, which edges past the eleven-year high of €1.1120 it set on Wednesday and gave up on Thursday. Corticeira Amorim added 0.71% to €7.07, EDP Renováveis (EDP Renewables) 0.73% and EDP 0.69%. Ibersol was the sharpest of the falls at minus 0.58% to €10.36, which tells you how little selling there was: the worst performer on the board lost six cents.

None of that was really about Lisbon. Europe rose across the board, and Lisbon rose less than most of it. The Stoxx 600 gained 0.55%, the French CAC 40 added 0.98% after Thursday's 1.68% collapse, the German DAX 40 rose 0.79%, the Spanish IBEX 35 climbed 0.87% and the FTSE 100 managed 0.23%. The banks that were the worst sector on the continent yesterday were among the better ones today, and BCP went along with them.

Wall Street was open and mildly positive when Lisbon shut. The S&P 500 was up 0.19% at 7,745.75 points, the Dow Jones 0.29% at 53,722.83 and the Nasdaq 0.22% at 26,600.52, with the artificial-intelligence trade still carrying the tape ahead of the Federal Reserve chair's speech at Jackson Hole. Two American moves are worth recording because they were unusually large: PayPal fell 12.2% after Bloomberg reported that the consortium of Advent and Stripe had abandoned its attempt to buy the company, and Marvell Technology lost more than 8% on doubts about the revenue timetable of its artificial-intelligence chip agreement with Google, despite raising its own 2027 revenue guidance. Gap rose 18% on a new Old Navy chief executive and a better profit forecast.

Crude went the other way, giving back ground for a second time this week with traders watching the Strait of Hormuz, where the shipping disruption arising from the conflict in the Middle East is now a standing feature of the oil price rather than an event in it. Galp, which opened the session as one of the two leaders, did not hold the position.

Five Lisbon Names Carry a Bet Against Them, and BlackRock Holds the Biggest

ECO published a piece of reporting this morning that is worth more attention than the day's price action, because it answers a question most Portuguese investors never think to ask: who is betting against the Lisbon exchange, and how much are they betting?

The answer, from the short-position disclosures held by the Comissão do Mercado de Valores Mobiliários (Securities Market Commission), is five companies and five funds. Under European rules a net short position has to be disclosed publicly once it passes 0.5% of a company's capital, so what follows is a floor rather than a total; there may be more below the threshold, and it would not be public.

The largest disclosed short in Lisbon belongs to the largest asset manager in the world. BlackRock holds a net short position of 1.4% of BCP, spread across two funds. It is worth being precise about what that does and does not mean: BlackRock is simultaneously one of the biggest long-term holders of Portuguese listed equity, and its long position in BCP is far larger than the short. The bet is a position inside a portfolio, not a verdict on the bank. It is also, as of today, a losing one, since BCP was the best performer on the index.

The second largest sits on Mota-Engil, where the Paris manager Eleva Capital, founded in 2014 by Eric Bendahan and running €17.1 billion, is short 0.93% of the builder. Mota-Engil carries a second short as well, and that one has history: Muddy Waters Capital, the activist short seller run by Carson Block, took 0.57% of the company in September 2024 and has never let go. The relationship has since moved into court, where the group has signalled confidence that a United States judge will dismiss the fund's defamation suit on jurisdictional grounds. Two funds shorting the same builder while it reports the best half-year in its history is one of the more interesting standoffs on the board.

The two paper companies are the target of a single fund. Qube Research & Technologies, the quantitative manager that Pierre-Yves Morlat and Laurent Laizet carved out of Credit Suisse's proprietary trading desk in January 2018 with $800 million and which now runs more than $40 billion, is short 0.79% of Altri and 0.6% of Navigator. Those are its only Portuguese positions, and they are the only disclosed shorts in either name. The logic is not hard to follow: both companies have had a bruising year, and Navigator's first-quarter profit fell 64% on storm damage and higher gas and carbon costs.

The fifth is NOS, where PSquared Asset Management, a Zurich fund founded in 2013 by Patrick Florian Bierbaum, holds 0.52%. That position sits against a share the Portuguese state is itself in the process of leaving, having moved in July to offload its residual 71 NOS shares.

Short selling is contentious in Portugal in a way it is not in London or New York, and the argument that it is speculation dressed up as price discovery has never quite gone away. What the CMVM register actually shows is more mundane than the argument: five positions, four of them small, one of them held by a manager whose long book dwarfs it, in an exchange that has spent the year going up.

A 392.7 Million Euro Debt Closes With 57,800 Euros Recovered

Yesterday we wrote about Novobanco putting the entire Luís Filipe Vieira exposure up for sale and asked what the recovery rate would tell us. Today, in a different file, we got an answer to a similar question, and the number is close to zero.

The personal insolvency of João Gama Leão, the former owner of Prebuild and one of the largest individual debtors of the collapsed Banco Espírito Santo, is about to close. Expresso reported this morning, and Jornal Económico confirmed the figures, that the sale of his assets raised €57,800 against creditor claims of €392.7 million. That is a recovery of 0.0147%, or roughly one and a half cents for every hundred euros claimed.

The distribution is worth setting out, because the arithmetic is startling at the level of the individual creditor. Novobanco, the largest, will receive a little over €13,000. The Autoridade Tributária (Tax Authority), which had €12.5 million of claims recognised, recovers about €26,000. Montepio, Caixa Geral de Depósitos and BBVA share what is left, which is to say almost nothing. Gama Leão was declared insolvent in 2017, after the Prebuild group, built out with heavy BES financing, collapsed. In 2021, before the parliamentary inquiry into Novobanco, he said he had borrowed to expand and internationalise his companies and described himself as a victim of the Grupo Espírito Santo and of Novobanco.

The reason to run this alongside the Vieira sale is not the personalities. It is that both files are the same accounting event seen at different stages: debt written down years ago, secured against assets whose value had already gone, now formally converted from a receivable into a rounding error. Novobanco's balance sheet does not move when €392.7 million becomes €13,000, because it stopped counting on that money a long time ago. What moves is the public record of what the BES era actually cost, and it is being finalised one file at a time.

SIBS Is Still Waiting for a Crypto Licence, and the Wait Has a Price

Definancy, the fintech that SIBS bought in 2024, is still waiting for the Banco de Portugal (Bank of Portugal) to authorise it to operate in crypto-assets, and has had to file an entirely fresh licence application to get there. Expresso reported the delay this morning.

The context is the rulebook that took effect two months ago, when Portugal brought crypto under the European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation on 1 July, splitting supervision between the Bank of Portugal and the CMVM. Providers registered under the old national regime did not carry their permissions across automatically; they had to be re-authorised under the new one, and the transition has caught several Portuguese firms, Definancy among them.

The cost of sitting in the queue shows up in the accounts. Definancy's loss widened from €112.9 thousand in 2024 to €857.3 thousand in 2025, a sevenfold increase. SIBS describes the period as one of investment and pre-commercial development, which is a fair description of a business that is building a product it is not yet licensed to sell. It is also a reasonable illustration of what MiCA costs in practice: the regulation was designed to make crypto services safe to buy, and the immediate effect on the supply side is that a company owned by the operator of Portugal's entire card and Multibanco infrastructure cannot get to market on its own timetable.

Shoe Exports Slip, Mota-Engil's Book Passes 20 Billion, and the Tills Speed Up

Portuguese footwear exports fell 2.1% in the first half to €813 million, APICCAPS (the Portuguese Association of Footwear, Components, Leather Goods and Substitutes Industries) announced today. The number is a decline, and the association is not pretending otherwise, but the comparison it wants you to make is with the neighbours. Italy's cumulative losses to May were 4.3% and Spain's 7.3%. Further out it is worse: China down 10.9% over the first five months, Brazil 15.7%, Turkey 5.3%, with only Vietnam holding up at minus 1.3%.

Executive director Paulo Gonçalves attributes the contraction to a general slowdown in global footwear trade, to the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East cutting off access to the luxury markets Portuguese makers had come to rely on, and to logistics, "especially in the Strait of Hormuz", which is now showing up in the cost base of a shoe factory in Felgueiras as well as in the price of Brent. The strategic position is intact: Portugal overtook Spain in production last year and remains Europe's second-largest maker, exports grew 0.8% to €1,718 million in 2025, and the average export price rose 2.5% to $28.25 a pair, second in the world only to Italy. Germany takes 24% of Portuguese shoes, France 20%, the Netherlands and Spain 11% each and the United Kingdom 6%. The quieter shift is in materials: leather has fallen from 69% of exports three years ago to 58%, while rubber and plastic have gone from 13% to 21% and textiles from 8% to 12%.

Mota-Engil, for its part, put a larger number on the table than the one it published yesterday. Speaking to Jornal Económico, chief executive Carlos Mota Santos said the order book now stands at €20.2 billion, made up of the record €17.7 billion reported at the half year plus roughly €2.5 billion of contracts signed since: the Lobito Corridor extension into the Democratic Republic of Congo at $1.8 billion over a thirty-year public-private partnership, which we covered on Wednesday, the Kano to Maradi rail extension in Nigeria at $655 million, a Peruvian airport at $140 million and €185 million of Mexican infrastructure. Rail alone accounts for more than €8 billion of the book, and the group says it has laid more kilometres of track than any other non-Chinese contractor over the past four years. None of this is in Portugal, which remains the point: the domestic pipeline runs through the Oiã to Soure tender, and that is still contested.

And a data point that says something about the consumer. The Instituto Nacional de Estatística (National Statistics Institute) reported that the trade turnover index rose 2.0% year on year in July, a tenth of a point faster than June. Retail grew 3.0%, with food up 2.5% and non-food 3.3%; wholesale returned to growth at 0.5% after a 0.6% fall; motor trade rose 3.9% but decelerated sharply, by 4.6 points. The uncomfortable line is underneath. Employment in the sector fell 1.6% against a 1.1% rise in June, wages grew 4.8% after 8.4%, and hours worked slowed to 1.1%. Sales are rising, and the sector is doing it with fewer people. That is either a productivity gain or a hiring freeze, and one month of data will not tell you which.

Bonds, the Euro, and Two Central Banks Turning Hawkish at Once

Portuguese ten-year debt yielded 3.63% at the close, about two basis points higher on the session. The German ten-year Bund rose further, by roughly four basis points to 3.29%, its highest since March 2011. Because the Bund moved more than the Portuguese bond, the spread narrowed to something close to 34 basis points, tighter than Thursday and still within touching distance of the tightest it has ever been. As has been true all week, none of this is a judgement on Portugal.

It is a judgement on the European Central Bank, and the market spent Friday hardening it. Spanish inflation for August came in at 4.3%, the highest since February 2023, and French inflation also firmed, while the French economy itself stagnated in the second quarter. Eurozone economic sentiment and employment expectations both improved in August. Taken together with the July account published on Thursday, in which some Governing Council members said they would not have opposed a rise, the pricing has moved decisively: markets now put the deposit rate at 2.80% by March next year and around 2.90% by late 2027, against 2.25% today. The Governing Council meets in Berlin on 9 and 10 September.

That feeds directly into Portuguese mortgages, where the Euribor rose again at every tenor. The three-month fixed at 2.573%, up 0.016 points and still the highest reading since March 2025; the six-month, which sits under about 40% of the variable-rate housing stock in Portugal, fixed at 2.762%, also up 0.016; the twelve-month rose as well. Anyone whose reset falls in September will be repricing into a higher number than the one they were promised at the start of the summer, a trajectory we first flagged when the twelve-month crossed 3%.

The second central bank is the Federal Reserve, and it is the reason equities were only mildly higher rather than strongly so. Speaking at Jackson Hole, chair Kevin Warsh set out an unusually explicit test: "we have to be confident that underlying inflation is moving toward our objective, clearly and at a sufficient pace. Otherwise, we have work to do." Investors read "work to do" as a rate rise and repriced immediately, lifting the probability of an increase at the 15 and 16 September meeting to almost 50% from around 40% earlier in the day. The federal funds rate has not moved this year and sits at 3.50% to 3.75%.

The euro barely noticed. The European Central Bank's reference rate fixed at $1.1643, against $1.1645 on Thursday, a move of two hundredths of a cent. Two central banks were talked into a more hawkish position on the same day, which is roughly the definition of a currency pair going nowhere.

Monday, and What S&P Says Tonight

The most consequential thing on today's calendar happens after this briefing goes out. S&P Global Ratings is scheduled to publish its half-yearly review of Portugal's sovereign rating tonight, once European markets are shut. Portugal is at A+ with S&P, and the agency moved the outlook to positive on 27 February, which is the formal signal that an upgrade to AA- is on the table. ECO reported this morning that no change is expected. That is the consensus, and it has been wrong before: Moody's holds Portugal at A3 stable, as we noted in May, and DBRS has A (high) with a positive outlook. If S&P does move, the bond market will find out about it before Lisbon opens on Monday, and 34 basis points of spread does not leave much room to celebrate.

Beyond that, Monday is the first session of September and the first without August's thin volumes to blame anything on. The domestic calendar is empty. BCP is the name to watch, for the obvious reason that it has just set a fresh eleven-year high while trading within a couple of cents of the €1.13 consensus target the sell side has compiled for it. We expect a flat to slightly firmer open, with the direction set by whatever the ratings decision says overnight and by whether European rate markets keep pushing the September meeting toward a rise. And if you want the day's genuinely new information, it is not in the index level: it is in the CMVM register, which now tells you that somebody with $15 trillion under management thinks BCP has run far enough.