By Carla Mozee, MarketWatch
LONDON (MarketWatch) -- European stocks dropped Monday, hit in
the wake of Friday's selloff on Wall Street that left the Nasdaq
Composite with its worst drop in two months.
The Stoxx Europe 600 fell 0.8% to 336.50, on track for a loss
that would be the index's first in nine sessions. The move followed
Friday's slide in U.S. stocks, led by heavy selling in so-called
momentum stocks such as biotechs and Internet companies.
Among Monday's sharpest decliners in Europe were shares of
Bouygues SA , down 5.7% after the company's bid for Vivendi SA's
French mobile unit SFR was rejected in favor of an offer from
Altice SA. Vivendi shares perked up 1.4%.
Also in focus was France's Lafarge SA after the cement maker and
Switzerland's Holcim Ltd. said they plan merge into the world's
biggest building-materials group. The deal involves Holcim
tendering for Lafarge, exchanging one Holcim share for each Lafarge
share. The deal for the new company, to be called LafargeHolcim, is
expected to close in the first half of 2015. Shares of Holcim rose
2.9%.
Lafarge shares climbed 3%, the best performing stock on France's
CAC 40 . The index as a whole, however, fell 0.7% to 4,452.14.
Among country-specific indexes, the U.K.'s FTSE 100 fell 0.5% to
6,664.30, and Germany's DAX 30 slumped 1.2% to 9,583.91.
European stocks on Friday pushed to intraday highs following a
German newspaper report that the European Central Bank had modeled
1 trillion euros of quantitative easing, raising the prospect the
bank may take action to fight low inflation. The Stoxx Europe 600
ended last week with its third consecutive weekly advance.
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