It sure feels like a long time ago now, but it’s been less than a decade since the European Union underwent a rather serious sovereign debt crisis.
This set off a roughly two year bear market for International Stocks as well as a rangebound mess for US stocks.
After this bout of volatility, most risk-assets carved out significant lows in 2016 and rallied higher until global risk peaked in 2018. Then it all fell apart again last year.
This brings us to today, where we’re now seeing European countries and indexes trade right back up to their 2018 or pre-COVID highs left and right.
While diversified global indexes like MSCI EAFE $EFA and MSCI Europe $VGK recently reclaimed their former highs from 2014, 2018, and are already well above their pre-COVID peaks – they are now approaching a far more important area of overhead resistance at their pre-financial crisis highs.
Last week, we used the BRIC countries $BKF to illustrate this theme of more and more international indexes trading at inflection points. Today, we’ll do the same by highlighting some of Developed Europe’s long-term underperformers… the PIGS.