LONDON: European stocks were set to open lower on Friday, with investors discouraged by a lack of progress in Greek debt crisis negotiations heading into crunch talks at the weekend.
Greece failed again to clinch a deal with its international creditors on Thursday, setting up a last-ditch effort on Saturday to avert a default next week or start preparing to protect the euro zone from financial market turmoil.
Futures for the EuroSTOXX 50, FTSE 100, DAX and CAC were all down 0.5-0.8 percent at 0603 GMT.
Residual optimism that some sort of deal may be struck helped support European shares on Thursday, which ended mixed even as the pan-European FTSEurofirst 300 index closed down 0.3 percent at 1,573.05 points. However, while a deal on Saturday is possible, traders said that the high amount of uncertainty ahead of the negotiations meant it was likely that there would be sharp swings in the market on Monday, making investors unwilling to leave themselves exposed heading into the weekend.
"The collapse of talks again on Thursday at the eurogroup level... means that any deal before the end of play on Friday is extremely unlikely", Craig Erlam, senior market analyst at OANDA, said in a note.
"By the time the markets reopen next week, Greece may have either secured a deal or accepted default to the IMF... with all this in mind, I expect to see significant risk aversion this morning with investors preparing for fireworks over the weekend."
In a quiet day for corporate reporting, Tesco may provide some support for the market after Britain's biggest supermarket showed a tentative recovery in its key home market, beating forecasts even as sales continued to decline.
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