(CercleFinance.com) – The session of the ‘3 witches’ which was announced this Friday morning under the best auspices (the gain on the February deadline exceeded 4% in pre-opening, everything argued for a final bouquet in the form of new highs historical) ultimately turns out to be very disappointing.
No 16th week of increase for Wall Street, and yet the S&P500 and the Dow Jones remained able to achieve the feat until around 8:15 p.m. (the closing levels of Friday February 9 being exceeded), which validated the gains of pre-opening and foreshadowed a record close.
The S&P500 also equaled its absolute pre-opening high, rising to around 5,045 around noon.
In the end, the ‘S&P’ lost 0.48% to 5,005 points (i.e. -0.42% weekly) and the Dow Jones -0.4% to 38,628.
The Nasdaq started the day badly and ended it even worse with -0.9% at 17,686 (i.e. -1.5% weekly, after peaking around 17,950 around noon as well), in the wake of Micron -2.6 %, On Semiconductors -2.5%, Meta -2.2%, Qualcomm -2, Alphabet -1.6%, Cisco -1.3%.
Some survivors with Applied Materials +6.4%, eBay +2%, KLA +1.4%, LAM Research +1.3%
In addition to the heaviness of ‘techno’ stocks, the S&P500 suffered from the decline of individual home builders such as Beazer Homes -3.6%, Pulte -2.9%, DR Horton -2.8%… due to deterioration rates, with a ’10 year’ which showed +5Pts towards 4.284%, the ’30 year’ +3Pts towards 4.445%.
This tension was blamed on the ‘PPI’: in fact producer prices increased by 0.9% in January at an annual rate in the United States while they were expected to increase by 0.6% (compared to + 1% in December). On a monthly basis, producer prices are up 0.3% compared to an expected increase of 0.1%.
Excluding food and energy, they are up 0.6% month-on-month, compared with a consensus of +0.1% and +0.2% in December.
Just like Tuesday with the ‘CPI’ (consumer price), the consensus is thwarted: it is all the more damaging as the ‘PPI’ is a component of the PCE index (the most common measure of inflation). followed by the Fed).
Disappointment also on the building permit side with a decline of -1.5% on an annual basis, to 1,470 million in the United States.
And it’s worse with housing starts which fell by -14.8%, to 1.331 million, after 1.562 million in December (compared to 1.450 expected).
Building permits and construction starts remained penalized by the high level of rates, and this will not improve in February since mortgage loan rates rise sharply.
American consumer confidence is improving a little this month, according to the index calculated by the University of Michigan which comes out at 79.6 in preliminary estimate, compared to 79 for the previous month.
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