Equities in Athens plunge, Greek ETFs steady

MONDAY is the first day in five weeks that the Athens Stock Exchange opened for business. After that long hiatus, Greece’s major equity bourse plunged at the open, tumbling from just under 791 at the open to 615.6 in a matter of a minutes. That is a 22 percent drop, or two percentage points above the definition of a bear market, in almost the blink of the eye.

The Global X FTSE Greece 20 ETF (NYSE: GREK) is receiving better treatment in the U.S. Proving that timing is everything, traders have bid up Greek stocks as the session has gone along, trimming the day’s loss on the ASE to 16.2 percent at time of writing. With the open of U.S. markets coming well after the open of European markets, GREK was trading higher by just over 1 percent.

GREK’s Monday upside is made all the more impressive when considering the action in Greek financial services shares earlier. National Bank of Greece (NYSE: NBG) fell 30 percent earlier in Monday’s Greek session, or limit down for the day while the overall banking index (.FTATBNK) was also down its limit, according to Reuters.

At the end of the first quarter, GREK allocated nearly a quarter of its weight to financial services stocks, the ETF’s largest sector weight by 730 basis points over consumer discretionary names. Entering Monday, GREK featured four banks among its top 10 holdings, including a roughly 8.4 percent allocation to National Bank of Greece, according to Global X data.

While stocks in Athens were closed, various media reports encouraged investors to look at the Market Vectors Egypt ETF (NYSE: EGPT) for possible signs of how GREK would perform once Greek exchanges reopened.