PARIS (Reuters) – The New York Stock Exchange opened in disorder on Wednesday but the trend is generally positive thanks to an easing in bond yields which reached record levels in previous sessions, even if the decline in Apple, linked to concerns over the iPhone, limits gains.
Fifteen minutes after the first exchanges, the Dow Jones index gained 51.17 points, or 0.18%, to 29,186.16 points. The broader Standard & Poor’s 500 rose 0.13% to 3,652.39 points after falling to a near two-year low on Tuesday on fears of a rapid rise in interest rates.
The Nasdaq Composite lost 0.13%, or 14.60 points, to 10,814.9 points.
The Bank of England (BoE) announced on Wednesday that it would buy as many British bonds as needed over the next two weeks to stabilize financial markets, an emergency intervention decided after the fall in prices of government bonds and of the pound sterling caused by the presentation of the government’s budgetary projects.
This announcement pushed up the price of British bonds and at the same time caused benchmark sovereign yields to fall.
The yield on 10-year US Treasury bonds, which had reached a 12-year high, stands at 3.83% (-11 basis points), while that of the German Bund of the same maturity, benchmark for the euro zone as a whole, came back from an 11-year peak, dropping around 10 basis points to 2.147%.
“Yields are now approaching the Fed’s desired target level of 4-4.5%. So as soon as that happens, we should see yields start to stabilize and that should boost stock prices,” said Peter Cardillo, chief economist at Spartan Capital Securities.
New technology groups, sensitive to changes in interest rates, evolve in disorder. Microsoft and Tesla fell 0.18% and 1.11% respectively, while Amazon and Meta Platforms advanced 0.55% and 1.50% respectively.
Apple fell by 4.32%, the group having, according to the Bloomberg agency, given up on its plan to increase production of its new iPhones, expectations on demand not having materialized.
The semiconductor manufacturer Qualcomm, supplier of Apple, yields 1.22%.
In the health sector, Biogen jumped 39.50% after the announcement of favorable results of a clinical trial on an experimental treatment against Alzheimer’s disease that it is developing with the Eisai group.
Its competitor Eli Lilly & Co, which is also working on a treatment for this disease, gains 7.30%.
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(Written by Claude Chendjou, edited by Jean-Stéphane Brosse)
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