After the Christmas break, the Spanish stock market resumed trading on Wednesday with setbacks, in a day of transition, awaiting the start of next year to take new positions.

The indices were not encouraged by the advance on Wall Street, which did open on Tuesday, in a scenario of low trading levels due to the absence of many investors because of the Christmas and New Year's holidays.

All in all, with three sessions left to close the year - including Wednesday - the Spanish Ibex-35 index accumulates an annual advance of 22.7%, its best performance since 2009, when the selective experienced an abrupt recovery after the debacle of the previous year due to the crisis in the financial sector.

After a bullish streak that led the Ibex-35 to touch its highest levels since 2018 on hopes of interest rate cuts in 2024, the rally has lost gas in December due to profit taking.

"In Spain, the Ibex 35 kept trading above the psychological barrier of 10,000 points, an area that sustained the Spanish index after the slight corrective phase from the highs of the year, a logical and necessary situation. Now, we will see the capacity of demand to sustain the 10,100 points after the pullback made by the market last week," says Diego Morin, analyst at IG.

For their part, Renta 4 highlights that "geopolitical risk remains high, where tension in the Red Sea continues to threaten world trade and is channeled into a barrel of Brent, which rose +2%, surpassing $80 per barrel".

The rest of the week will be light on macroeconomic data, with the release of the weekly US unemployment report on Thursday and the Spanish CPI for December on Friday, as markets await further clues on the steps of the major central banks in the year that is about to begin.

At 08:15 GMT on Wednesday, Spain's selective Ibex-35 stock market index was down 21.10 points, or 0.21%, to 10,090.80 points, while the FTSE Eurofirst 300 index of large European stocks was up 0.03%.

The banking sector, one of the few sectors that can be harmed by reductions in the cost of loans, was the main drag on the Ibex: Santander lost 0.93%, BBVA fell 0.32%, Caixabank dropped 0.30%, Sabadell fell 2.43%, Bankinter lost 2.29% and Unicaja Banco lost 0.45%.

Among the large non-financial stocks, Telefónica fell 0.59%, Inditex dropped 0.13%, Iberdrola lost 0.21%, Cellnex gained 1.03%, and the oil company Repsol rose 0.33%.

(Information by Tomás Cobos)