This time last year, the international investment community seemed evenly divided on the euro zone. Half really hated the market, and the other half simply disliked it. A year later, and the hotels of Madrid are full of US opportunistic investors looking for distressed portfolios, and the German central bank is warning of a housing bubble! With the United States caught in political deadlock and central bank uncertainty, the euro zone now looks like a haven of relative stability.

Still, it is not just the mood in Europe that is looking better. Since April 2013, we have seen a structural bull market in global equities. The news from China, with a knock-on impact on her Asian trading partners, has improved, and Abenomics seems to be having a genuine impact on Japan. It is hard to escape the notion that the world is now entering its recovery phase, with risk appetite rising in a variety of markets and asset classes.

The euro zone is at the vanguard of this improvement. A y