(CercleFinance.com) – The start of March has given rise to a fireworks display of records (S&P500, Nasdaq Comp., Nasdaq-100) and comments at the close report a market in ‘all-mode’ in’, with a bullish rally that has more and more similarities with the period at the end of 1999/beginning of 2000.
The US indices completed 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 +1.15% for the Nasdaq (even doubled to 16,302 and 16,275) and the Nasdaq-100 is even stronger with +1.5% (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% (at $1,400), AMD (+5.3% and +15% weekly) and even KLA with +5.4%, Micron +5%, Cadence +3.6%… and the inevitable Nvidia with +4% which shatters $820 and climbs beyond $2,000 billion in capitalization (2,003 billion $), in a volume of $36 billion (the equivalent of 2 weeks of activity on the Parisian market).
The semiconductor sector soars by +4% this evening and displays a stratospheric gain of +20% in 1 month (this is indeed comparable to the behavior of ‘dot.com’ in the 1st quarter of 2000).
The Dow Jones is content with +0.25% at 39,090, 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 points, or 1,000 points more than its previous record of 38,900 recorded there. 34 years ago.
We were wondering at 1 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’: ISM activity in the American manufacturing sector contracted for the 16th month in a row (from 49.1 to 47.8) in February, according to the monthly survey published Friday by the Institute for Supply Management (49.5 anticipated).
The new orders sub-index fell by 3.3 points to fall below the critical threshold of 50 points, to 49.2 against 52.5 the previous month.
The component measuring production also fell into the contraction zone, at 48.4 in February after 50.4, while that of paid prices remains high, at 52.5 against 52.9 in January.
American consumer confidence deteriorated sharply in February, according to the index calculated by the University of Michigan which ultimately came out at 76.9, whereas it had stood at 79.6 in preliminary estimates and afterwards. 79 for the previous month.
The T-Bonds, on the other hand, relaxed by -6Pts towards 4.192% and signed a good week with a gap of -5Pts… which comes down to today’s improvement (which takes the week from red to green).
This ‘late’ relaxation is to be linked – it is quite logical – to the poor manufacturing ISM as well as the fall in the consumer confidence index of the University of Michigan.
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