Markets, Business & Tech Briefing: The PSI Gives Back Thursday's Record, the Bank of Japan Follows the Fed, a Finnish Buyer Steps In for a Guimarães Spinning Mill

Thursday's session in Lisbon was a straight line upward: the low came in the first minute of trading, the high was the closing print, and the PSI finished at the top of its own 52-week range. Friday was the same picture held up to a mirror. The high came at 08:01, the low at 16:35, and the index gave back 128.90 of the 130.45 points it had won the day before. Nothing much happened in Portugal to cause it. What happened was that a third central bank in eight days raised interest rates, and the bond market repriced accordingly.

The PSI Gave Back Thursday's Record in One Session, and the Week Still Ended Higher

The PSI closed at 9,542.21 points, down 128.90 points or 1.33 percent from Thursday's 9,671.11. That ends three consecutive sessions of gains.

Read the shape of the day off the tape and it is Thursday inverted. The index opened at 9,660.43, ten points below the previous close. It made its high of 9,661.63 at 08:01, in the first minute of the session, and its low of 9,539.13 at 16:35, which is the close itself. Twenty-four hours earlier the high had carried the 16:35 stamp and the low the 08:01 stamp. A day whose low and whose last price are within three points of each other is a day nobody wanted to buy into.

Two things are worth keeping straight. The first is that the 52-week range Euronext publishes still reads 7,671.74 to 9,671.11, because the top of it is Thursday's close and Friday did not go near it. The record set 24 hours ago stands; the index simply sits 1.33 percent below it, which is the same number as the day's fall. The second is that the week was still a positive one. The PSI closed at 9,524.73 on Friday 11 September, a figure this newsletter published at the time, so five sessions later it is 17.48 points or 0.18 percent higher, arithmetic recomputed here. Jornal de Negócios reaches the same conclusion in words, noting the index "managed to rise slightly" across the week. On TradingEconomics, which tracks the index separately, the PSI is 3.28 percent higher over the past month and 23.86 percent higher than a year ago.

Fifteen of Sixteen Fell, and Mota-Engil Was the Only Name Left Standing

Fifteen of the sixteen constituents closed lower. The one that did not was Mota-Engil, up three tenths of a percent. On Thursday the count was fifteen up and one down, so even the breadth reversed exactly.

Closing prices and session moves are Euronext's own, taken from the Lisbon equities list and stamped 16:35 WEST on 18 September. Every one of the sixteen was checked here against Thursday's published close and all sixteen percentages reconcile. Jornal de Negócios independently reports the same index close and the same fifteen down, one up split.

One small correction to the record, since it is easier to explain than to bury. Negócios prints EDP's close as 4.907 euros. Euronext prints 4.807, and 4.807 is the figure consistent with both papers' own 0.93 percent fall from Thursday's 4.852. The table above is Euronext's throughout.

The leadership inverted along with everything else. NOS, Mota-Engil and the two EDP names had been the top of Thursday's board; on Friday NOS was the single worst performer in the index. The heaviest weights on the PSI were the two that Negócios names, Jerónimo Martins and BCP, with the retailer down 2.22 percent to 17.66 euros and the bank down 2.24 percent to 1.176 euros. Sonae made it three consumer names above 2 percent, falling 2.14 percent to 2.06 euros. BCP has now given back a meaningful slice of the run that took it to an eleven-year high earlier in the week.

Energy fell too, but less, and that is the detail that dates the session. EDP lost 0.93 percent, EDP Renováveis 0.70 percent and Galp 0.73 percent on a day when crude was falling again. On Wednesday the oil-to-Galp link looked mechanical, on Thursday it broke, and on Friday it half held. Three sessions, three different answers, which is usually a sign that the thing moving the shares is not the thing you are watching.

Lisbon's loss was the smallest of the large European exchanges, so the outperformance streak survived the direction change. On TradingEconomics contract-for-difference pricing stamped 18 September, the euro-area blue-chip index fell 1.46 percent to 6,233, Britain's 1.45 percent to 10,659, Germany's 1.64 percent to 25,294, France's 1.71 percent to 8,047, Italy's 1.86 percent to 51,413 and Spain's 1.90 percent to 19,454. That is the fourth consecutive session in which the PSI has done better than the main European markets, and the first of the four in which doing better meant losing less.

Wall Street was still trading as this was written and was taking it more calmly: the S&P 500 was down 0.23 percent at 7,620.50 and the Dow Jones down 0.44 percent at 51,549, on the same contract-for-difference basis. Those are intraday levels, not closes.

The Bank of Japan Followed the Fed by a Vote of 7 to 2, and Took Its Rate to the Highest Since 1995

The proximate cause of a red Friday in Europe sits in Tokyo. The Policy Board of the Bank of Japan decided on Friday, by a 7 to 2 majority, to raise the uncollateralised overnight call rate by a quarter point, to around 1.25 percent, effective 24 September. The interest rate on the complementary deposit facility goes to 1.25 percent and the basic loan rate to 1.5 percent on the same date. Negócios notes that 1.25 percent is the highest Japanese policy rate since 1995.

The reasoning is worth quoting rather than summarising, because it is the same reasoning every central bank in this newsletter has been using for a month, arriving from an unusual direction. The Bank's own statement, read here first-hand, says Japan's economy "has recovered moderately, although some weakness has been seen in part, partly due to the impact of the situation in the Middle East". On prices: producer price inflation "has continued to be high on a year-on-year basis, reflecting the impact of the expansion in AI-related demand, in addition to high crude oil prices and the depreciation of the yen", while consumer price inflation "has been moderately rising recently, as upward pressure on prices in business-to-business transactions has started to spill over into consumer prices". Medium to long-term inflation expectations "have continued to rise", and underlying inflation "has been approaching 2 percent", with an explicit risk of overshooting it.

Read that list again. Oil, a weak currency, and artificial intelligence demand. Two of those three are exactly what has been driving European yields since February, and the third is the reason American technology shares have held up through it. A separate and unanimous decision in the same statement switched the Bank's climate-response funding operations to a floating loan rate with caps on the amounts lent.

Three central banks have now moved in eight days: the European Central Bank last week, the Federal Reserve on Wednesday and the Bank of Japan on Friday, with the Bank of England holding on Thursday. Three of the four were increases. Negócios reports Japanese government bond yields at their highest in thirty years, and when the last large buyer of low-yielding global debt starts paying more at home, the effect turns up in every other bond market. It turned up in this one on Friday.

Every Yield We Follow Rose, Portugal's Spread Widened to 39 Basis Points, and France Had the Worst Day in Europe

All seven ten-year yields we track went up, after two consecutive sessions in which all seven had come down. On TradingEconomics country pages stamped 18 September: Portugal 3.90 percent, up 0.05 points on the day; Germany 3.51, up 0.04; Spain 4.00, up 0.04; Greece 4.30, up 0.05; Italy 4.43, up 0.09; France 4.57, up 0.12; and the United States 5.01, up 0.07.

Portugal's spread over the German Bund therefore widens to 39 basis points, out from 37 on Thursday and back to where it stood on Tuesday. Recomputed here from those seven levels, Portugal borrows ten-year money 10 basis points inside Spain, 40 inside Greece, 53 inside Italy and 67 inside France. Only Germany pays less among the countries on this list, and the 39 basis points Portugal pays above it is the only one of those five gaps that runs against Lisbon.

France is the outlier and deserves a sentence of its own. A 12 basis point rise in a single session is more than double the move in any other euro-area market on this list, it takes the French ten-year to 4.57 percent, and it came on the same day the Paris index fell 1.71 percent. France now pays more for ten-year money than Italy, and on TradingEconomics' own longer measures it is up 0.45 points on the month and 1.02 points on the year, both the worst of the seven. Portugal's equivalents are 0.29 and 0.73. That is a national story rather than a euro-area one, and it is worth watching from Lisbon precisely because it is not contagious so far.

The Euro Has Now Fallen Seven Sessions in a Row, and Thursday's Euribor Went the Right Way

The European Central Bank's daily reference rate put the euro at 1.1460 dollars on Friday, against 1.1481 on Thursday, a fall of 0.18 percent. Against the pound the euro was fractionally firmer at 0.85880, from 0.85830.

The single-day move is small. The run is not. The euro has now fallen against the dollar on seven consecutive publishing days, from 1.1652 on 9 September to 1.1460 on Friday, which is 1.65 percent over seven sessions. The ECB's 90-day file was pulled and every daily move in it computed: seven is the longest unbroken run of declines in the whole window, which reaches back to 22 June. This is what a fortnight of rate rises outside the euro area looks like when priced in a currency.

On the Euribor, Thursday's fixing published on Friday morning, as euribor-rates.eu runs a day behind. The numbers reverse Wednesday's and favour Portuguese borrowers. The twelve-month rate fixed at 3.345 percent, down 2.9 basis points on the day; the six-month at 2.962 percent, down 1.1; and the three-month at 2.633 percent, down 2.8. At the very short end the one-week rose 4.3 basis points to 2.354 percent and the one-month rose 2.5 to 2.475 percent.

Those are the two fixings that matter most to households here, and both went down. Portuguese variable-rate mortgages reprice off the six and twelve-month Euribor, and after Monday's sharpest one-day rise since March that is the first genuinely helpful fixing of the week. It is also a small one: at 3.345 percent the twelve-month rate is still 18.5 basis points above where it fixed a week earlier, on 11 September, so a single good day has not undone the move.

Oil Heads for Its First Weekly Fall in Three Weeks, While Saudi Arabia Tells European Refiners They Get Nothing Next Month

Brent traded around 104 dollars a barrel through Friday afternoon and was lower on the day on every reading available to us: ECO logged the front contract at 104.12 dollars, down 0.68 percent, at 16:06 Lisbon time, and TradingEconomics stamps the benchmark at 103.66 dollars, down 1.11 percent, on its own contract-for-difference basis. The two sources are pricing slightly different instruments and the gap between them is smaller than the day's range, so what is reliable here is the direction and roughly the level, not the second decimal. West Texas Intermediate was 101.32 dollars, down 0.58 percent.

The weekly picture is the cleaner one, and it is ECO's: Brent is heading for its first weekly decline in three weeks, with a loss of more than 2 percent across the five sessions. Earlier in the week it had been near a four-month high.

Underneath that easing, though, is a story that points the other way for Europe specifically, and it is the most important paragraph in this briefing for anyone who buys electricity or diesel in Portugal. Saudi Aramco has told at least two European refining customers that they will receive no crude allocation at all next month, following the attack on the East-West pipeline that crosses the Arabian Peninsula. This is the same pipeline whose partial restoration, promised within days, was the reason prices fell on Wednesday and Thursday. Both things are true at once: Saudi Arabia is bringing capacity back and is offering extra cargoes to Asian refiners through ship-to-ship transfers off Sohar in Oman, and it is simultaneously cutting specific European buyers to zero. "Recent efforts to recover Saudi export capacity have reduced some of the immediate anxiety around supply," Priyanka Sachdeva of Phillip Nova told Reuters, in remarks carried by ECO. The anxiety that has been reduced is global. The barrels that are not arriving are European.

The European gas market is already behaving as though it has noticed. On TradingEconomics, the European benchmark rose 3.65 percent on Friday to 79.14 euros per megawatt hour, and is 24.87 percent higher than a month ago and 144.97 percent higher than a year ago. A market that has more than doubled in twelve months is not a market that has priced in a resolution.

Diesel Goes Up Again on Monday, and the Running Total Since March Is 52.2 Cents

Anecra, the Associação Nacional das Empresas do Comércio e da Reparação Automóvel (National Association of Motor Trade and Repair Companies), told ECO that diesel should rise about 6.5 cents a litre next week and petrol about 5 cents, with the figures already incorporating the fuel-tax discount the government was due to announce at the end of Friday. Jornal de Negócios, working from its own sources, puts the two rises slightly higher at 7 cents and 5.5 cents. Both cautions apply: Friday's Brent settlement and the currency can still move the final numbers, though not by much.

The cumulative figure is the one to hold on to. Since the government introduced its extraordinary discount on the fuel tax, a rebate sized to hand back the extra VAT the higher prices generate, diesel has risen 52.2 cents a litre and petrol 23.4 cents, before next week's increase. The mechanism triggers whenever prices rise ten cents measured from the week of 2 to 6 March, which is the week before the American and Israeli strikes on Iran. At Thursday's Council of Ministers the government extended the discount to the end of December but chose not to deepen it. We covered the most recent widening of the rebate on 12 September.

Lagarde, in Dublin, Refuses to Tie Interest Rates Automatically to the Price of Energy

Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, was asked in Dublin on Friday whether energy prices and interest rates move together, and declined to accept the premise. "Interest rates do not automatically follow the evolution of energy prices, because obviously the price of energy and its impact on prices also has effects on other factors, notably growth and consumption, and we take all of those elements into consideration," she said at a press conference following the informal meeting of euro area finance ministers. "So there is no automatic mechanism of correspondence between the two."

She was equally plain about what the ECB did do. "As you know, we raised our rates by 25 basis points. Uncertainty largely defines our economic horizon and it was very clear to everyone that this decision was necessary in order to meet our commitment to reach our 2 percent target in the medium term."

The setting was the informal Economic and Financial Affairs Council in Dublin, under the Irish presidency of the Council of the European Union, which gathers all 27 finance ministers, Portugal's Joaquim Miranda Sarmento among them, to exchange views without taking decisions. One subject on the table was the digital euro, and Lagarde pressed for speed: "We very much hope that the legislative process currently under discussion on the digital euro will be concluded and finalised before the end of this year, and the sooner the better." She thanked the Irish presidency for its determination to move the file forward "so that we can proceed with the implementation of the pilot project, as planned, in mid-2027". Three Portuguese institutions have a direct interest in that timetable: CGD, BCP and Unicre were picked for the pilot in July.

Set Lagarde's first answer against Friday's tape and the tension is obvious. She is telling the market not to read a mechanical rule off the oil price. The market spent Friday doing precisely that, in seven bond markets at once.

Portugal's External Surplus Shrank by 1.6 Billion Euros in Seven Months, and Imports Did It

Portugal's external surplus stood at 2.4 billion euros in the seven months to July, a reduction of 1.6 billion euros against the same period last year, according to Bank of Portugal figures published on Friday and reported by ECO.

The composition matters more than the headline. The goods deficit widened by 2.7 billion euros. Against that, the capital account surplus improved by 1.3 billion and the secondary income surplus fell by 286 million. Those three components net out to the 1.6 billion deterioration, arithmetic that reconciles exactly.

Inside the goods balance, imports grew by 5.4 billion euros while exports grew by 2.7 billion. That is the energy shock arriving in the national accounts by the front door: a country that buys its oil and gas abroad, at prices that have risen the way this briefing has been recording all month, runs a bigger import bill whether or not anything else changes. The smaller decline in secondary income is attributed largely to a higher Portuguese financial contribution to the European Union budget.

The improvement in the capital account is the one piece of genuinely unusual accounting, and the Bank's explanation is worth noting because it is a one-off. It reflects an increase in reinsurance indemnity receipts from abroad, compensation for the damage caused by the train of storms at the start of the year, together with growth in European funds classified as investment aid reaching final beneficiaries, notably from the Recovery and Resilience Plan. In other words, part of what is holding the external surplus up is insurance money for a natural disaster and a spending programme with an end date. We reported the half-year version of this series on 19 August, when the surplus had halved to 0.8 percent of GDP. July's data continue the same direction.

A Finnish Fibre Company Is Buying a Guimarães Spinning Mill Out of Insolvency for 500,000 Euros

Spinnova, the Finnish wood-fibre company, has signed a letter of intent to acquire the entire share capital of Tearfil, a spinning mill at Moreira de Cónegos in the municipality of Guimarães, in a transaction valued at 500,000 euros that could complete at the start of 2027. Tearfil is currently in a Processo Especial de Revitalização (Special Revitalisation Process), the Portuguese court-supervised procedure through which a company negotiates with creditors while continuing to trade.

The price tells you the condition of the business. Founded in 1973, Tearfil closed 2025 with turnover of 8.57 million euros, down roughly 34 percent from 12.94 million in 2024, and a loss of 3.27 million euros against a loss of 448,000 the year before. It went through a restructuring plan in 2025 that included 30 redundancies, and Negócios puts its debts at about 16 million euros and its headcount at 135. The owner is Belém Machado, who took over her father's spinning business at the start of this century after more than two decades practising medicine.

The structure of the deal is the interesting part, and it reads as the conditional purchase it is. Spinnova will extend Tearfil a bridging loan of 1.5 million euros during the revitalisation process, to restructure existing debt and to fund working capital and operating needs, subject to Spinnova's approval. The loan runs for one year at twelve-month Euribor plus 2 percent, which as of Thursday's fixing prices it at 5.345 percent. Under the letter of intent it is to benefit from the priorities, protections and recovery rights available under Portuguese insolvency and restructuring law, and from security granted in Spinnova's favour. The loan agreement will also contain early repayment mechanisms should Spinnova decide not to proceed with the acquisition. That is a lender protecting itself while it looks under the bonnet, not a buyer who has committed.

The industrial logic is real rather than financial. "Tearfil has been an important partner of Spinnova, playing a key role in developing Spinnova fibre with a view to commercial applications," said Janne Poranen, Spinnova's chief executive, quoted in the document. "Integrating these capabilities into Spinnova would strengthen our ability to support wider adoption of Spinnova fibre and to advance the commercial expansion of our technology." Spinnova is itself heading for a listing on the American Nasdaq.

For the Minho this is the better of the two available endings. A mill in a revitalisation process with 135 jobs is usually a story about how many of those jobs survive; a strategic buyer who already uses the plant as a development partner is a different proposition, even at a purchase price that would not buy a house in central Lisbon. It also lands in a sector this newsletter looked at in detail on 4 September: 11,965 companies and 118,000 jobs, with the factories rather than the brands doing the work of the green transition. Tearfil is what that finding looks like at the level of one company, including the part where the company nearly does not make it.

Trade Republic Gave Its Older Portuguese Customers 48 Hours to Move, or Lose Their Interest

Two months after telling its Portuguese customers that moving to its new local branch was a cost-free choice, Trade Republic has emailed the ones who stayed with the German parent a 48-hour deadline, after which they lose interest on uninvested cash and round-the-clock customer support. Both services continue only for those who accept a Portuguese IBAN. The broker confirmed this to ECO.

The contrast with July is the story. When the German broker opened its Portuguese branch on 16 July with a national IBAN, a free current account and 3 percent for new customers on balances up to 50,000 euros, it was explicit that nothing was being imposed: existing customers "continue to receive the European Central Bank rate, currently 2.25 percent, on the entire balance", with no mention of deadlines, penalties or withdrawn services. Portuguese-language support 24 hours a day was presented as an achievement already delivered across the whole customer base.

Asked why those two services are now being withdrawn from customers who did not migrate, Trade Republic points to internal management. Migration "remains optional for customers who already had a Trade Republic account before the branch launched", it told ECO, and "the differences at the level of services arise from operational and technical questions". Maintaining two account configurations and service models in parallel "generates significant complexity and costs". The company rejects the word penalty: it "does not consider that the differentiation of conditions between the two account configurations constitutes a penalty for customers who choose not to migrate", and says the decision is not driven by a portfolio conversion target, nor does the branch imply a gradual wind-down of existing contracts with Trade Republic Bank GmbH.

There are real reasons a customer might not want to move, and they are not stubbornness. Taking the Portuguese IBAN means activating a current account and accepting updated terms, in a model built around receiving salaries and making payments; someone who uses the platform only to invest or park savings gains little from that. It also brings Portuguese withholding tax on the interest, and a different custody and remuneration framework to assess.

One detail in ECO's reporting deserves more attention than the deadline. Uninvested balances are spread across partner banks including Deutsche Bank, HSBC and Crédit Agricole, protected by the relevant national deposit guarantee schemes up to 100,000 euros per customer per institution. But above a threshold Trade Republic calls the partner amount, set at 15,000 euros for customers inside the Portuguese branch, the excess is no longer held at a bank at all. It is placed in money market funds managed by firms such as BlackRock or BNP Paribas, and money in a fund is not covered by the deposit guarantee. Trade Republic argues those funds offer a comparable level of safety by a different route. That may well be true, and it is still a different legal position from a deposit, which is worth knowing before you park 50,000 euros anywhere on the promise of 3 percent.

Also: VivaGym's Owner Chases Fitness Park, and Warren Buffett Hands the Chair to His Son

Providence Equity, the American private equity firm that owns the VivaGym chain and absorbed Fitness Hut into it in Portugal, is among the best-placed bidders for the French operator Fitness Park, valued at around 600 million euros, according to the Spanish daily Expansión as reported by ECO. Fitness Park is owned by Philippe Herbette, with Future French Champions, a vehicle of the Qatar Investment Authority and Bpifrance, as its principal minority shareholder; it counts more than 400 sites and turns over more than 400 million euros a year including franchises. The Portuguese angle is six gyms in Porto, Guimarães, Carnaxide, Braga and Aveiro, which would not have to change name: Providence's stated intention is to keep both brands even if they end up under one holding company. Providence's model has been to buy low-cost fitness chains, merge them for scale and reinvest in the sites, and it already owns Smartfit, Macro Fit, Altafit, One Fit, Body Factory, Fitup, Dreamfit, Fitness4All, BeWay and Synergym. The report is Expansión's and describes a process that is not concluded.

And Warren Buffett announced on Friday that he is leaving the chairmanship of Berkshire Hathaway, a post he has held since 1970. He becomes chairman emeritus at 96 and remains a director; his son Howard G. Buffett, a Berkshire director since 1993, succeeds him. It completes a handover begun at the start of 2026, when Greg Abel took over as chief executive. "Greg runs the company; Howard will protect its culture and its values, both of which are worth more than anything on our balance sheet," Buffett wrote. He also noted that he has "been in Berkshire's service since 1965. More than sixty years later, I still have the best job in the world."

Monday

The PSI goes into next week 1.33 percent below a record it set on Thursday and still marginally up on the week, which is a more comfortable position than Friday's tape makes it feel. Three questions decide the next session and none of them is Portuguese. Whether Japanese yields keep climbing now that the Bank of Japan has moved, because that is what pushed European bonds on Friday. Whether France's twelve basis points were a French problem or the start of a broader one. And whether Saudi Arabia's decision to cut specific European refiners to zero next month starts showing up in the Brent price, which so far it has not, or only in European gas, where it already has. At home, diesel and petrol both rise at the pump on Monday morning, and Friday's Euribor fixing publishes at the same time.