(CercleFinance.com) – The New York Stock Exchange opened in scattered order on Monday morning in a calm market as Christmas approached, the Dow Jones being supported by oil companies while the Nasdaq suffered from the decline in technology stocks.
At the end of the morning, the Dow Jones nibbles 0.1% to 32,959.4 points, but the Nasdaq Composite drops not far from 1% to 10,602.2 points.
In the absence of catalysts, Wall Street is buoyed by the rebound in oil prices, in response to hopes of a reopening of the Chinese economy and the recent weakening of the dollar, which benefits oil stocks.
American light crude (West Texas Intermediate, WTI) gained 0.4% to over 74.5 dollars, while the greenback fell towards 1.0590 against the euro.
The oil ‘majors’ like ExxonMobil and Chevron both win 0.5%. Oil services such as Schlumberger (+0.8%) are also well oriented.
On the downside, technology groups, including Apple (-1.4%), fell sharply.
Meta Platforms, Facebook’s parent company, is still down more than 2.8%, bringing its year-to-date losses to some 70%, the equivalent of $750 billion in capitalization gone up in smoke.
Analysts estimate that between them, the GAFAMs (Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft) have lost nearly $2.5 trillion in market valuation this year.
Tesla shares are down 1.7% despite speculation surrounding Elon Musk’s possible departure as Twitter’s chief executive.
For the record, this calm period of the year traditionally allows investors to carry out their last balance sheet dressing operations, in particular by selling the winning stocks over the year.
For the moment, Wall Street has not really benefited from the traditional bullish movement at the end of the year, since the S&P 500 index has so far shown a decline of around 6% since the beginning of December.
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