Strong earnings lift European shares

LONDON, Aug 5 (Reuters): European shares eked out gains on Tuesday driven by upbeat earnings from a number of blue-chip companies, while the euro fell to the day's low after a broadly disappointing set of services activity data.
Investors were cheered by strong results from German luxury carmaker BMW and France's third biggest listed bank Credit Agricole, among others, enabling European equities to buck the trend in Asian markets which were hit by weak Chinese data.
But the gains appeared fragile ahead of a US survey that could cast fresh light on the pace of recovery in the world's biggest economy.
The pan-European FTSEurofirst 300 index of blue-chips was up 0.5 per cent at 1,333.78, a small recovery from its near 4 per cent fall over the past two weeks.
The index has been pummelled by concerns about a tightening of US monetary policy, financial trouble at BES and political tensions, notably in Ukraine and Gaza.
With all these concerns still present in the market, traders said the downtrend may resume shortly.
"Nothing has materially changed since last week," Jonathan Sudaria, a dealer at Capital Spreads, said. "The down-move may have stalled and some markets have had a modest uptick, but traders are already framing this as a textbook dead cat bounce."