European markets celebrated inflation data and the pause in interest rates by the central banks last month. In Europe, the Morningstar Europe NR index (with dividends reinvested) rose by 6.7% in Euros in November and accumulated a gain of 11.1% for the year.
Analysing the November performance of the stocks that make up the European market, the higher gains of growth companies over value companies clearly stand out. Focusing more specifically on the large companies segment, the Large Growth style gained 8.7% versus 4.6% for the Large Value style.
The poor relative performance of the value style is largely explained by the bad performance of the energy sector, which was the only one to end November in negative territory, down 0.9% in euros. In fact, the companies that contributed most negatively to the performance of Large Value were the oil majors such as Shell [SHEL], BP [BP] and TotalEnergies SE [TTE], which lost 1.2%, 2.5% and 1.5% in euros respectively.
But within this group of stocks, there were two companies that fell sharply: Germany's Bayer AG [BAYN] and Uniper SE [UN01], which declined -22.9% and 20.4% in euros respectively.
In the area of growth companies, the most notable were those in the technology sector such as ASML Holding NV [ASML], SAP SE [SAP] and Adyen NV [ADYEN] which rose by 10.5%, 14.8% and 69.0% respectively. The technology sector rose the most last month with a gain of 16.0% in euros.
The second most profitable sector was real estate, despite the difficulties posed by high interest rates, and the third most profitable sector was industrials, up 10.5%. Three of the largest companies in the sector rose significantly: Siemens AG (+10.9%) [SIE], Schneider Electric SE (+16.3%) [SU] and ABB Ltd (+15.6%) [ABBN].
Regarding valuations, the consequence of the strong performance of large-cap growth stocks has was that this segment's valuation returned to overvalued territory, with a Price/Fair Value of 1.06 (indicating a 6% overvaluation).