Trading on Wall Street remained at a standstill for the first 4 hours of the session (S&P500 unchanged, Dow Jones losing 0.2%, Nasdaq gaining +0.1%), before a timid sell-off materialized from 7:30 pm onwards.


Optimists will note that the S&P500 and Nasdaq set new intraday all-time highs at 6,094.6 (at 7.50pm) and 19,790 (around 6.20pm) respectively.
The Dow Jones, which had spent the entire session in the red, ended the day down -0.55%, while the S&P500 gave up just -0.17% at 6.076, and the Nasdaq by -0.17% to 19,702.
The Russell-2000 fell sharply (-1.32% to 2,394), having narrowly avoided breaking the 2,433 barrier the previous day, and is now moving away from its November 25 record of 2,466.
The Nasdaq-100 dropped -0.31% to 21,425 (from a record high of 21,517), weighed down by Synopys -12.4%, Cadence -6.5%, Microchip -5.5%, Intel -5.3%, Applied Materials -5%, and AMD -2%, reflecting the downturn in the 'semis' (the SOXX dropped -1.9%).

No reaction from Wall Street to the day's US statistics, despite one pleasant surprise: the US trade deficit fell sharply to $73.8 billion in October, compared with the previous month's $83.8 billion (which was revised from an initial estimate of $84.4 billion), according to the Commerce Department.

This 11.9% month-on-month decline in the deficit resulted from a 4% contraction in US imports of goods and services, to $339.6 billion, thus outstripping a 1.6% drop in exports, to $265.7 billion.
On the eve of the publication of the NFP, the Labor Department announced that 224,000 new U.S. jobless claims were registered last week, up 9,000 on the previous week.

The four-week moving average - more representative of the underlying trend - stood at 218,250 for the week to November 30, up 750 on the previous week.

Lastly, the number of people receiving regular benefits fell by 25,000 to 1,871,000 in the week to November 23, the most recent period available for this statistic.

US T-Bonds are unaffected by this rise in unemployment: they could have eased, but they ended unchanged at 4.1800% and the '2-yr' posted +2.4Pts at 4.1450%.

In a sign of traders' appetite for all assets with strong upward potential, bitcoin overnight broke the symbolic $100,000 barrier for the first time in its history (record raised to $104.000 'tout rond'), buoyed by hopes of deregulation of the cryptocurrency sector with Donald Trump's forthcoming return to the White House.
Bitcoin falls back to 99,400 this evening, retaining a +1.5% lead...

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