(BFM Bourse) – Despite the persistence of uncertainties on the economic consequences of the uncontrolled spread of the Omicron variant, the CAC 40 is based on the very positive opening of Wall Street to regain 0.76% on Monday, to ten points from its historical record at the close.
Contamination records? What contamination records? Judging by the direction of the stock markets on Monday, the current health situation is nothing to worry about. Judge rather: after recovering 2.31% over the past week, which allowed it to come back well above the threshold of 7,000 points, the CAC 40 adds 0.76% of gains on Monday and closes the first session of the last week of 2021 at 7,140.39 points. That is 16 points from its historic peak reached on November 17 (at 7,156.85 points) at the end of a historic rally.
The S&P on the way to a historic 69th record in 2021
Sluggish in the morning (+ 0.06% at 12:40 p.m.), the Parisian market was once again able to count on the support of Wall Street, where operators enthusiastically returned to work after a long weekend. The main New York indices show in fact increases of between 0.6% for the Dow Jones and 1% for the Nasdaq (+ 0.9% for the S&P) around 5:20 p.m., helped by encouraging economic statistics. Retail sales for the holiday season in particular rose 8.5% in the period from November 1 to December 24 compared to last year, according to data from MasterCard SpendingPulse “It’s good bodes well for the economy at the dawn of the new year. The rally will continue even if the fear of the virus remains predominant in the market “, advance Peter Cardillo, chief economist at Spartan Capital Securities.
“This week will be either a feast or a famine, with little in between,” said Jeffrey Halley, Oanda analyst, in his morning note. “Either there will be violent intraday movements in stocks with low liquidity due to the holidays, or the volatility will remain flat,” he explains. In Paris, the volume of trade remained very contained on Monday, only 1.7 million euros having changed hands within the CAC 40.
While new British studies have indicated that Omicron will lead to fewer hospitalizations, its meteoric spread around the world raises fears of restrictions or disorganization in economies in the near term. In France, the executive is now mobilized to transform the “sanitary pass” into a “vaccine pass” which will condition access to certain places to three doses of vaccines (the two initial doses plus the booster), after the bar of 100,000 new cases in 24 hours was crossed this Saturday, December 25, which is a record since the start of the pandemic.
This new pandemic outbreak primarily benefits the “Covid values” of the French flag, including the self-test manufacturer Biosynex (+ 10.4%) or the Franco-Austrian biotech Valneva, which is the source of a vaccine against Covid (+ 4.8%). The specialist in the manufacture and marketing of in vitro diagnostic products, Novacyt is also soaring (+ 14.3%), as is the champion of single-use medical products (gloves, gowns, etc.) Euromedis (+9.5 %).
Among the largest stocks, Sartorius Stedim Biotech (+ 1.7%), Boiron (+ 3.4%) or Eurofins Scientific (+ 1.8%) are also sought after.
Within the flagship index, Stellantis posted the best performance with a gain of 2.3%, while Worldline (-1.2%) and L’Oréal brought up the rear.
Sharp rebound in oil prices
Without any particular topicality except for an apparent relief from the dangerousness of Omicron, oil prices have rebounded very noticeably since the opening of Wall Street, and have returned to a high for more than a month. Around 6 p.m., a barrel of Brent actually gained 3.5% to $ 78.4 when the North American benchmark, WTI, traded at $ 75.4 a barrel on the Nymex (which was closed on Friday unlike the ‘Intercontinental Exchange where North Sea Brent is traded), up 2.8%.
No big movement, however, on Forex, where the single currency takes 0.07% against the greenback at 1.1327 dollars. Bitcoin for its part gained 1.5% to $ 51,500, the highest since the beginning of December.
Quentin Soubranne – © 2021 BFM Bourse