(CercleFinance.com) – No 20th week of increase for Wall Street which still drops -0.5% (S&P500) to -1.15% (Nasdaq-100).
The initial heaviness continued over the hours, without really gaining momentum: it would have taken ‘not much’ for the weekly balance to return to positive since the Dow Jones ended at -0.02%, the S&P at -0.13%… however, a little more was missing for the Nasdaq composite which dropped -0.7%.
The ‘techno’ index suffered from the plunge of Adobe -13.7%, the declines of Intuit -3.8%, MongoDb -3.7%, On Semiconductors -3%, Cadence -2.6%, NXP -2.5%, Charter Com, Broadcom and Microsoft -2.1%, Cisco -1.7%, Alphabet -1.5% and Meta -1.6%.
All the components of the ‘SOXX’ (-0.7%) did not end up in the red: AMD and Micron gained +2.1%, Nvidia resisted (-0.1%) and posted +77.5% in 2024.
Perhaps there should have been reassuring figures, but those published this Friday will not dispel the uneasiness relating to recent inflation data.
Import prices in the United States increased by 0.3% in February compared to the previous month (+0.2% excluding petroleum products), while export prices increased by 0.8%. , both in raw data and excluding foodstuffs.
The picture is more comforting over 12 months: import and export prices fell respectively by 0.8% (-0.5% excluding petroleum products) and 1.8% last month (-1 % excluding foodstuffs).
The most anticipated figure of the day had no impact: American consumer confidence remained generally stable in March, according to the index calculated by the University of Michigan which came out at 76.5 in preliminary estimate, against 76.9 the previous month.
The index, however, shows an increase of 23.4% compared to March 2023 and consumers remain very present as demonstrated on Thursday by solid retail sales, accompanied by the strongest annualized increase in producer prices since September.
Note – even if it is not a very ‘convincing’ figure – a sharp contraction in manufacturing activity in New York State in March, according to the ‘Empire State’ index of general conditions from the local Fed: index plunged 19 points from the previous month to stand at -20.9.
The bond markets are coming out of a ‘complicated’ week: rates have tightened significantly since Tuesday and T-Bonds have further deteriorated by +2 points to 4.31%.
Note a big hit of stress on Bitcoin around 2:30 a.m.: it fell from 72,000 to around $65,700 (floor tested around 10:00 this morning) before rebounding towards $68,300… which makes it barely stable over the week elapsed.
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