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15 Top Performing European Stocks So Far in 2023

Fahad Saleem
13 min read

In This Article:

In this article, we will take a look at the 15 top performing European stocks so far in 2023. To see more such companies, go directly to 5 Top Performing European Stocks So Far in 2023.

The Bank of England on March 23 raised its benchmark lending rate by a quarter point to 4.25%, the highest since 2008. The bank followed the Federal Reserve of the US which also went ahead with a 25 bps rate hike despite the banking crisis. The latest hikes from central banks have defied analysts’ expectations for a pause in rate hikes as they were expecting the latest bank failures to be alarming enough to force the central banks to put brakes on monetary tightening to save the financial system. The Bank of England indicated confidence in the banking system and said inflation remains the biggest risk in the current environment. The BOE governor Andrew Bailey said in a letter to the Treasury that “price stability is an essential pre-requisite to achieve this objective in all parts of the United Kingdom and sectors of the economy.” BOE also said it is open to further rate hikes to control inflation if needed.

The European stock market experienced its fair share of optimistic euphoria during the start of the year. Analysts and investors were expecting the inflation to come under control this year and central banks to stop their interest rate hikes. But some were calling the optimism short-lived and were already foreseeing the bearish trends in the market. According to a Bloomberg report, Goldman equity strategist Sharon Bell said in January that she expected “weak returns” in the European stock market “even though we have raised our price targets” for Stoxx 600 Index.

Bloomberg also mentioned its survey of 19 market forecasters in its January 20 report. The survey said the Stoxx 600 Index will end 2023 at 452 points.

In November 2022, Goldman Sachs published its outlook report for 2023 for Europe. The firm reiterated its “long-held view” that the energy crisis will put the continent into recession this winter. However, Goldman Sachs at the time that it was seeing a “shallower recession as the hard data have remained surprisingly resilient, the rebalancing of the gas market has reduced the risk of energy rationing and governments have provided significant fiscal support."

Goldman Sachs in its report said it believes the Euro area economy will contract by only 0.7% from the last quarter of 2022 to the second quarter of 2023.

Top Performing European Stocks So Far in 2023
Top Performing European Stocks So Far in 2023

Luis Louro / shutterstock.com

Our Methodology

For this article, we first used the Finviz stock screener to list down European stocks which have posted gains in 2023 through March 23. From the resultant dataset we picked stocks with the highest stock price gains in 2023 through March 23. We preferred stocks trading on US stock exchanges. The list is ranked in ascending order of percentage gains of stocks.

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