Wall Street ended Wednesday's session without direction, with the Dow Jones eroding 0.1% to 38,461, the Nasdaq Composite clawing back 0.1% to 15,713 and the S&P500 ending unchanged, but with a 'green' score for the symbol (5.071 vs. 5.070 the previous day).071 versus 5,070 the previous day).

The Nasdaq-100 gained +0.3% in the wake of Tesla +12% (despite a 50% drop in profits), Microchip +5.2%, Texas Instruments +5.6%, ON semiconductors +6.3%... but Nvidia lost -3.3% and Applied Materials -3.4%.

And the Nasdaq-100 lost all its gains shortly after the close (down -1% in electronic trading), while Meta Platforms plunged -16% (to $413) following the publication of its quarterly results.

Although the social networking giant reported quarterly EPS of $4.71 per share, versus $2.20 a year earlier, and sales climbed 27.3% to $36.46 billion, Wall Street was expecting more, and not as much caution for 2024.

US T-Bonds continued to deteriorate with a week to go before the FOMC meeting, but the market was behaving as if the forthcoming announcements were to confirm that the first rate cuts will be postponed until early autumn.

The bond markets had begun to stall early in the morning, so we can't even point to the day's figures: US durable goods orders (+2.6% in March) just acted as an aggravating factor.

Still on the statistics front, the EIA reported US crude oil inventories of 453.6 million barrels for the week ending April 15, down 6.4 million barrels on the previous week.

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