Trophy assets: Euros and Copa wins lift stock markets

LONDON : Sunday's Euro 2024 final between England and Spain and the Copa America showdown between Argentina and Colombia both look like being tight affairs - but history shows there is one thing that usually comes out on top - the winning side's stock market.

Of the last six Euro Championship winners, Greece, Spain and Italy's bourses have all outperformed the pan-European STOXX 600 after their victories, while only France in 2000 and Portugal after its 2016 title saw notable underperformances.

Perhaps a reflection of the shock of the triumph, the Athens market outran the STOXX by an impressive 20 per cent six months on from Greece's 2004 win - a couple of years before the country's debt crisis kicked off, of course.

The first of Spain's back-to-back trophies in 2008 and 2012 came at the height of the global financial crisis, meaning most stock markets were taking a dive, but the Spanish bourse still managed to outperform by losing 5 per cent less than the benchmark over the next half a year.

Then 2012 was even more dramatic, coming during the second peak of the euro zone debt crisis and just before then ECB President Mario Draghi calmed markets by vowing to do "whatever it takes" to fix things.

That meant Madrid's IBEX initially slumped despite Spain's 4-0 thumping of Italy in the final. But by the end of that year, it had outscored the STOXX by around 4 per cent, which incidentally was how much the FTSE MIB outperformed after Italy's win last time out.

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Analysts and academics have looked into this kind of impact before.

Research published by Britain's University of Surrey using OECD data going back to 1961 showed that winning the World Cup increases GDP growth by at least 0.25 per centage points in the two subsequent