For the fourth consecutive session, the US indices closed Friday on narrow scores and the market ended without direction, leaving the week positive (the third in a row) thanks to the bullish surge of Monday May 6.

Another missed opportunity for the S&P500 to break a record: it had started the session well (climbing towards 5.240, 0.25% from its best close on March 28), but quickly retreated back to the previous day's levels before ending with a token gain of around +0.15% at close to 5,223 points.

The Nasdaq Composite (-0.03% at 16,341 points) finished for the fourth time in a row without direction (no positive or negative gap greater than 0.25%), penalized by Moderna -4.4%, PayPal -2.4%, Tesla -2%, Amazon -1.1%, Alphabet and Apple -0.8%. Monday also saw a gain of +1.2%, with the following four sessions ending in stagnation.

The Nasdaq-100, however, broke away from the 'Composite' with a gain of around +0.25%, thanks to Charter Com +4.4%, Micron +2.9%, Broadcom +2.1%, Zscaler +1.6%, Nvidia +1.3%.

The rise in equities may have been thwarted by the decline in ten-year US Treasuries: their yield rose by +5.7 basis points to 4.505%, and the yield on the 2-year Treasury note tightened by +6 basis points to 4.865%.

This tension seems to have had nothing to do with the US consumer confidence index drawn up by the University of Michigan, which fell by almost -10 points in May, to 67.4, its lowest level for six months, according to preliminary figures (analysts were forecasting a much smaller decline).

In detail, the current conditions component of the index fell to 68.8 in May from 79 last month, while the expectations component dropped to 66.5 from 76 in April.

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