Wall Street ended slightly higher, but this was enough to enable the Dow Jones (+0.45%, 3rd best closing price ever, at 36,695) and the S&P500 (+0.57% at 4,683.5) to set new all-time closing highs.

The year 2024 is thus in the green for the 2 historical indices mentioned above, with the Nasdaq-100 gaining 0.7% (to close at 16,800) in the wake of Nvidia (+2.5%), which smashed a new all-time high at $545.5.800) in the wake of Nvidia (+2.5%), which smashed a new all-time record at $545.5, i.e. +10% since January 1, already the best performance among the Fantastic 7.
Note the solid rises of Palo-Alto +5.2%, Meta +3.7%, Juniper +2.1% (after +21% the previous day) and especially Intuitive Surgical with +10.2%.

Although commentators are evoking a wait-and-see mood ahead of US inflation data, a wind of confidence was blowing in from lower Manhattan this evening.

Perhaps some positions are already taking shape ahead of the fourth-quarter US corporate earnings season due to kick off on Friday, with releases from major banking groups JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo.

Today's session also saw no significant movement on the bond market, in the absence of any major economic indicators: US wholesale inventories fell slightly again, by 0.2% in November 2023, according to the Commerce Department, after -0.3% in October.... data which are 2 months old and irrelevant for determining future trends.

US T-Bonds ended the day unchanged at 4.018%: we can truly speak of a 'pause' on the eve of the CPI.

Note that 'WTI' oil reversed course on the NYMEX, falling from +1.4% to -1.3% at $71.3 after the release of data from the US Energy Information Agency (EIA): these showed that US crude oil inventories stood at 432.4 million barrels in the week to January 1, signalling a modest increase of 1.3 million barrels on the previous week.

Inventories of distillates - including heating oil - rose by 6.5 million barrels, while gasoline stocks were up by 8 million barrels, again compared with the previous week, the agency continues.
Finally, the EIA states that refineries operated at 92.9% of their operational capacity during the same week, with average production of 9.7 million barrels/day.

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