(CercleFinance.com) – The start of March gives rise to a fireworks display of records (S&P500, Nasdaq Composite, Nasdaq-100) and the closing comments indicate a market in ‘all-in’ mode ‘, with a bullish rally that has more and more similarities with the period of late 1999/early 2000.
The US indices complete an 18th week of growth, with a weekly gain of +1% for the S&P500 (+0.8% this Friday and another double: intraday record at 5,140 and closing at 5,137), soaring +1.14% this Friday for the Nasdaq Composite (even doubled to 16,302 and 16,275) and the Nasdaq-100 is even stronger with +1.44% (doubled 18,333 and 18,303) for a weekly gain of +2%.
The stars of the day were NetApp with +18.2%, ahead of Marvell Techno +8.3%, Broadcom +7.6%, AMD +5.3% and Micron +5%… and the inevitable Nvidia with +4% which shatters $820 and rises beyond $2,000 billion in capitalization ($2,003 billion), in a volume of $36 billion (the equivalent of two weeks of activity on the Parisian market).
The semiconductor sector soared by +4% during Friday’s session and posted a stratospheric gain of +20% in one month (this is indeed comparable to the behavior of ‘dot.com’ in the 1st quarter of 2000 ).
The Dow Jones is content with +0.23% at 39,087, but no one is interested in it anymore. Regional banks continued their descent into hell with a sectoral decline of -1.1% (the compartment ended up in the red lantern like the previous day).
Note that the day started well, with the Nikkei (+1.9%) soaring +2.1% weekly, to approach 40,000, or 1,000 more than its previous record set 34 years ago. . We were wondering one hour before the close if the Nasdaq was not also going to post a 2% increase, as the ‘rally mode’ seemed inexorable.
Investors have taken note of various rather disappointing statistics that Wall Street hastened to skip into the category of ‘anecdote with no stock market relevance’: the ISM index of the American manufacturing sector remained below 50 without change for the 16th month in a row, going from 49.1 in January to 47.8 in February.
American consumer confidence deteriorated sharply in February, according to the index calculated by the University of Michigan which ultimately came out at 76.9, compared to 79.6 in a preliminary estimate and after 79 for the previous month. .
T-Bonds, on the other hand, eased by -6 basis points towards 4.192%, which allowed them to have a good week with a gap of -5 basis points, a ‘late’ relaxation to be linked to the poor manufacturing ISM as well as the fall of the ‘UMich’ index.
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