Markets, Business & Tech Briefing: PSI Slides 1.89% Off the 16-Year High as BCP Sells the BPCE News, CTT Cracks 5.2% Pre-Earnings, OT-Bund Spread Widens to 45bps

PSI Closes May's First Session at 9,168.05, Down 1.89% — BCP Reverses the BPCE Bid, CTT Cracks Pre-Earnings, and the Tape Reads the Middle East Energy Channel

Euronext Lisbon's regulated cash market reopened on Monday, 4 May 2026 after Friday's 1.º de Maio Labour Day closure with the PSI's 9,344.96 Thursday hold-over print as the live mark. The index opened in line at 9,358.84 — a few points above Thursday's close on a brief mark-to-market — before sliding through the morning to an intraday low of 9,149.61 and closing at 9,168.05 points, a daily decline of 176.91 points or 1.89%. That is the largest single-session drop since mid-March and roughly unwinds Thursday's 1.47% BPCE-close pop, with the index ending some 40 basis points below the pre-deal level on a week-on-week basis. Cash equity turnover ran at an estimated €155 million, modestly above the 30-day rolling average of €110 million on the post-holiday catch-up. The decliners' list ran four-deep before the first gainer surfaced. CTT Correios de Portugal shed 5.15% on the cleanest pre-earnings de-risk of the session — the postal-and-banking group prints Q1 2026 on Tuesday into a tape that has already absorbed the Iran-war shipping-cost channel and the EU postal services VAT-status debate, with sell-side desks running scenarios that haircut Tuesday's net-profit expectations on the parcel side. Teixeira Duarte followed at -4.04%, with the construction group's Iran-war-affected Saudi and Algerian books — already cited by Pedro Dominguinhos at the weekend as a PRR-execution-risk factor — extending the catch-up to the regional cyclical re-rating; Banco Comercial Português sold off 3.54% in the cleanest sell-the-news trade of the session, with the BCP tape reversing the bid that had been priced into the BPCE-owned Novo Banco close on Thursday and reopening the question of whether the Polish Bank Millennium Q1 print (+68% net profit to €71.2 million, already on the tape) is enough to carry the BCP standalone story without the Novo Banco re-rating tailwind. Mota-Engil dropped 3.07% on a fresh leg of the Mozambique LNG-and-coal-corridor news cycle and the broader EM-cyclical pullback; NOS SGPS shed 3.02% as the telecom-tower-and-fibre desks stayed cautious into the renewed Q2 capex disclosures expected by mid-May. The only material counter-trend prints came from Ibersol at +1.50% and Altri at +0.60% — a defensive consumer-and-pulp-paper bid that fits the Iran-war-shock playbook of rotating into low-beta domestic names with low energy intensity. EDP's mechanical opening adjustment for the €0.20 ex-dividend (record date 5 May, payment 8 May) accounts for roughly five basis points of the index drop in isolation; the rest is risk-off.

OT Yields Move 3.8 Basis Points Wider to 3.538%, Bund Spread Edges to ~45bps; EUR/USD Falls to 1.1691 on the Middle East Energy Channel

Portugal's 10-year Obrigações do Tesouro yield closed Monday's session at 3.538%, up 3.8 basis points on Friday's cross-market hold-over print, with an intraday range of 3.433% to 3.540% that ran the full duration of the European trading day. The 52-week range on the OT now spans 2.925% to 3.634%, so the close sits in the upper third of the 12-month channel but still 10 basis points short of the recent high. The German 10-year Bund closed at 3.089%, up about 0.8 basis points on the day; the OT-Bund spread therefore widened to roughly 45 basis points, two basis points wider than Saturday's hold-over read of 43bps and at the wider end of the 2026 channel — though still comfortably below the 60bps level last seen in early 2024 and consistent with the IGCP's strong primary-market reception this spring. Brent crude moved up modestly on the Strait-of-Hormuz risk premium, supporting the Iran-war-channel narrative running through the morning's rating-agency commentary; the curve stays in modest backwardation, which keeps the downstream-margin tailwind alive for Galp on the refining side. EUR/USD slipped 0.26% to 1.1691 on a session range of 1.1684 to 1.1750 — the day's low is the lowest mid-session print since the Iran-war risk-off cycle began in late April, and the 1.17 figure is now the live test of the post-2022 dollar-weakness range. The 52-week range is now 1.1065 to 1.2079; today's print is closer to the lower bound. The IGCP holds no auction on Wednesday's 7 May calendar slot, leaving the next syndicated tap window open into mid-May, with Tuesday's European Commission Spring Forecast and Friday's US non-farm payrolls the dominant duration drivers ahead of the corporate-earnings double-print on Wednesday.

Q1 Banking Earnings Crystallise — BPI -2% to €133 Million, Montepio -31% to €23.6 Million, Both on Credit-Impairment Base Effects, BPI's Youth Book Cleared by the BdP

Two more Q1 prints landed on the tape today, both shaped by the same credit-impairment-reversal base effect that has compressed the year-on-year comparison across the Portuguese banking sector. BPI — the CaixaBank-owned Lisbon lender led by João Pedro Oliveira e Costa — booked €133 million in net profit, a 2% year-on-year decline, with the gross operating result holding flat and the impairment line moving from a recovery to a small charge. The same release contained the off-site response to the Bank of Portugal's tightened mortgage-supervisor regime: BPI's youth-credit book — the segment Lisbon's central bank has flagged as the most exposed to a 2026 housing slowdown — was cleared as clean in CEO commentary, with the bank highlighting that the average loan-to-value on the under-35 mortgage stock sits at a more conservative threshold than the sector aggregate. Caixa Económica Montepio Geral reported net profit of €23.6 million for the quarter, down 31% year-on-year, with the headline drop attributable almost entirely to the absence of the credit-impairment-reversal that boosted the Q1 2025 print; net interest income tracked the rate-decline path lower, and the deposit base hit a record €13.4 billion. Both prints land before BCP's own Q1 release later in May, with the read-through that the sector's NII has now rolled over and the next leg of the earnings story runs through fee-and-commission income, the resolution of the Fundo de Resolução residual liabilities (last weekend's BPCE €1 billion first cheque covers about 15%), and the BdP's tightened mortgage-LTV supervisory regime that takes effect mid-2026.

Outbound M&A and Industrial Pivots — Martifer's €33 Million Angola-Plus-Renewables Bookings, Rei dos Frangos's €40 Million Benfica Capital Gain, Ysium's Defence-and-Aerospace Walk

The corporate-news flow today ran heavy on the outbound-and-pivot file. Martifer, the Oliveira de Frades-headquartered metallic-construction group, booked a €3 million hospital steel contract in Angola and lined up €30 million-plus of renewables capex across Poland and Romania — a portfolio rebalancing toward higher-margin lusophone and CEE renewables tied to the EU's RePowerEU programme that lifts the 2026 backlog visibility into a multi-year frame. The release also clears the company's residual exposure to the Mozambique LNG and Saudi project-finance freeze that has weighed on the cyclical-industrials desks since the start of the Iran-war cycle. Lourenço Manuel Ferreira — the family behind the Rei dos Frangos retail chain and a long-standing minority Benfica SAD investor — booked a €40 million capital gain on a €45.2 million sale of a 16.38% stake in Benfica SAD to a Delaware-incorporated vehicle linked to a US institutional buyer; the original cost basis is roughly €5 million from the late-2010s public-offering subscription. The deal does not pierce any concert-party threshold under Portuguese securities law and Benfica SAD's free-float rises modestly. Ysium — the Vila Nova de Famalicão precision-optics group founded by Hugo Freitas after the Leica industrial-optics carve-out — walked from civilian Leica optics into the European defence and aerospace supply chain, booking €10 million-plus of 2026 revenue from Leopard 2 stabilisers, sniper-sight components and Galileo satellite parts; the company has now joined the German-defence-and-EU-space supplier shortlist and is in advanced talks with two further tier-1 primes on Frigate-class naval optics. None of the three names trade on the PSI, but together they map the export-and-pivot leg of the Portuguese industrial economy that the rating agencies cited this morning as a structural cushion against the Middle East energy shock.

Outlook: CTT Tomorrow, EC Spring Forecast on Tuesday, EDP and EDPR Double-Print Wednesday — Q1 Earnings Season's Heavy Week Now Live

Tuesday 5 May 2026 is the busiest day of the Lisbon earnings calendar so far this season. CTT Correios de Portugal prints Q1 2026 before the open; consensus has been quietly walked back over the past fortnight on the parcel-volume and Iran-war-shipping channels, with today's 5.15% pre-earnings de-risk suggesting the buy-side has already adjusted. The European Commission Spring Forecast publishes the same morning with an updated Portugal-specific growth-and-deficit path; the IMF's late-April revision to 1.9% growth and 3.1% inflation is the running benchmark, with the Government's nominal-zero balance call at risk of a small-deficit slip. Wednesday brings the EDP and EDPR Q1 double-print — the most important single-day corporate read of the week, with the EDP family's combined PSI weight close to 30%; the EDP €0.20 ex-dividend went through Monday's open, payment 8 May. The IGCP holds no auction on the 7 May slot, leaving the next syndicated tap window open into mid-May. The week closes with US non-farm payrolls on Friday 8 May, the dominant cross-market duration driver into the next ECB meeting cycle. BCP's own Q1 lands later in May.