At 3:30 pm (Paris time), Wall Street was lining up for its 19th week of gains, but at 4:55 pm, all hell broke loose as Nvidia plummeted from $975 to $875. It was as if someone had pulled the rug out from under Nvidia's feet, which wiped out more than $250 billion in the space of five hours.

The impact on the Nasdaq-100 (-1.53% in the end) was decisive on the downside, symmetrically to the locomotive role of the previous two sessions: this fall alone radically changed the picture for the week, as the weekly performance went from slightly positive to clearly negative.

Nvidia dragged down Micron -1.5%, AMD -1.9%, Qualcomm -3%, Cadence and Applied Materials -3.3%, Intel -4.7%, Microchip and On-Semiconducors -4.8%, Broadcom -7%... and Marvell Techno, which had already fallen -12% at 10.15pm on Thursday evening following its results, plunged a further -11.3%.

The S&P500 (-0.65%) was held back by cruise liners, tourism (reservation platforms), pharmaceuticals and financial stocks, but this was not enough to keep the index in the green over the past week (-0.25% overall). The Dow Jones (-0.18% on Friday) fared no better on a weekly basis with -0.8%.

The March 8 session will go down in history, however: the S&P500 set a new record at 5,185, as did the Nasdaq Composite at 16,450, and the Nasdaq-100 peaked at 18,416.

Nobody saw coming the turnaround that came a good two hours after the publication of the employment report ('NFP').... which was a non-event, just like the Fed's 'Beige Book' on Wednesday, Jerome Powell's speech and the ECB meeting on Thursday: everything was in line with market expectations.

An hour before the opening, the NFP came in ahead of expectations with an unexpected acceleration in job creation to 275,000.000, but the Labor Department sharply revised down January's estimate to 229,000 from 353,000.

The unemployment rate rose to 3.9% in February from 3.7% the previous month, while the rise in average hourly earnings slowed to a reassuring +0.1% month-on-month and +4.3% year-on-year.

US T-Bonds remained virtually unchanged at around 4.09%, the ounce of gold smashed a new all-time high at $2,185/Oz, and Bitcoin experienced a "saloon door" sequence with a record high at $70,160 before a $400 drop to $66,180, ending at $68,200 at 11:00 p.m.

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