The trend, clearly positive at the start of the morning (with fairly homogeneous rises of around +0.9% shortly after the opening) turned around fairly quickly, and US indices were already posting declines of around -1% by mid-session.

Wall Street finished close to the day's lows: the Dow Jones limited the damage with -0.65% (thanks to Goldman Sachs +2.9%, UnitedHealth +1.5%, Verizon +1%) at 37.735, but the S&P 500 sank by 1.2% (as much as on Friday) to just under 5062.

The Nasdaq Composite fell by 1.8% to 15,885, in the wake of Salesforce -7.1%, Tesla -5.6%, Zscaler -3.6%, Autodesk -3.1%, Netflix, Broadcom and Nvidia -2.5%, Apple -2.2%, Microsoft -2%, AMD and Alphabet -1.8%, PayPal -1.7%, Amazon -1.4%.

The initial losses were caused by higher-than-expected retail sales (rate tensions detrimental to the 'technos'), then increased as the Israeli army chief of staff, General Herzi Halevi, dashed hopes of an easing of tensions by saying that his country would 'retaliate' against the Iranian attack.

Geopolitical tensions have thus resurfaced, along with fears that the Federal Reserve will only cut its key rates twice this year (instead of the six or seven times anticipated at the start of 2024).

The deterioration in US bond markets was amplified by US retail sales figures that came in above expectations: the '10-yr' shot up by almost +15 basis points to 4.64%... and the '2-yr' flirted with 5.00% (4.999%).

US retail sales rose by 0.7% on a sequential basis in March, ahead of market expectations, and excluding the automotive sector (vehicles and equipment) were up by 1.1%.

Copyright (c) 2024 CercleFinance.com. All rights reserved.