The Spanish IBEX 35 stock index lost most of the gains made in the previous three sessions in the early stages of Tuesday, at an opening marked by investor concern over the lack of new stimuli in China.

The president of China's economic planner, Zheng Shanjie, expressed confidence that the country will achieve its annual economic targets, but offered few details on how they plan to implement the recently outlined support measures.

The brokerage house Renta 4 indicated that "to this is added, in the background, the persistence of geopolitical risk (Middle East) and the moderation of expectations of rate cuts by the Fed (the probability of -50bp at the next meeting on 5-November has been eliminated, and the market currently discounts -25bp with a probability of 88% after the good US employment data)."

In this regard, investors are counting this week on two references that could refine their bets on the direction of interest rates in the United States: the minutes of the last Federal Reserve (Fed) meeting to be published on Wednesday and the US consumer price index on Thursday.

According to interest rate futures in LSEG's IRPR tool, markets currently expect a total of 51 basis points of rate cuts this year, which is two 25-point cuts.

Beyond economic and monetary issues, financial markets were analyzing the news flow from the Middle East for the risk that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian movements Hamas and Hezbollah could spill over to other countries.

At 07:15 GMT on Tuesday, the selective Spanish stock market IBEX 35 was down 77.30 points, or 0.66%, to 11,640.20 points, while the FTSE Eurofirst 300 index of large European stocks was down 0.88%.

In the banking sector, Santander lost 0.79%, BBVA fell 3.83%, Caixabank gave up 0.30%, Sabadell fell 0.69%, Bankinter dropped 0.73% and Unicaja Banco lost 0.65%.

Among the large non-financial stocks, Telefónica fell 0.11%, Inditex dropped 0.42%, Iberdrola gained 0.07%, Cellnex gained 0.08%, and the oil company Repsol lost 0.68%.

(Information by Tomás Cobos; edited by Mireia Merino)