2023-05-16 20:10:05
The New York Stock Exchange ended lower on Tuesday, worried about the state of the American consumer, but also the prospect of high rates for longer, while the technology sector once again fared well.
The Dow Jones fell 1.01%, the Nasdaq index fell 0.18% and the broader S&P 500 index fell 0.64%.
The New York market got off to a bad start with the results of the DIY chain Home Depot (-2.51%), which published, before the market, a quarterly turnover significantly lower than expected and reported ” pressures” on demand.
“It brought everyone down to earth,” commented Steve Sosnick of Interactive Brokers. “It’s not good at all.”
The analyst pointed out that Home Depot’s lagged quarter ended at the end of April, making it a more advanced indicator than most companies that have reported since the start of the first three-month earnings season. ‘year.
The impression was confirmed by retail sales in the United States in April, which rose only 0.4% over one month, while economists had forecast a rise of 0.8%.
At the same time, other indicators painted a more positive picture of the American economy, in particular industrial production, which rose by 0.5% in April whereas it was expected to be stable, or the confidence index of property developers, also significantly better than expected.
“These figures are high” and likely to dissuade the American central bank (Fed) from lowering its key rate in the short term, estimated Steve Sosnick.
An impression reinforced by the exits of several members of the Fed who have defended, in recent days, the idea of maintaining rates at a high level in the medium term, even, for some, of additional increases, underlined Jack Ablin , of Cresset Capital.
This chart pushed bond rates up. The yield on 10-year US government bonds rose to its highest level in two weeks, at 3.57%, against 3.50% the day before closing.
– “Vogue of artificial intelligence” –
In the wake of Home Depot, several retail stocks, such as the other major DIY chain Lowe’s (-1.16%) or the electronics brand Best Buy (-2.70%), suffered. .
The current even won the behemoths Target (-1.62%) and Walmart (-1.38%), whose results are expected on Wednesday and Thursday respectively.
The Dow Jones also paid the price for the initiative of the American competition authority, the FTC, which took legal action to try to block the takeover of the Horizon Therapeutics laboratory (-14.17%) by the biotech Amgen (-2.42%), announced at the end of 2022.
As often since the beginning of the year, the technology sector has broken through in the gloom.
“We favor quality” and giant capitalizations, such as Alphabet (+2.68%) or Amazon (+1.98%), argued Jack Ablin. “There is also the vogue for artificial intelligence” (AI), which benefits the most prominent players in this new technology.
The hearing on Tuesday, before a parliamentary committee, of Sam Altman, boss of OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, has, if necessary, shed even more light on AI and its very extensive possibilities.
“There is always a lot of enthusiasm for anything that directly or indirectly relates to artificial intelligence,” noted Steve Sosnick.
The semiconductor manufacturer AMD (+4.19%) and the graphics card specialist Nvidia (+0.90%), major providers of crucial elements to develop the capabilities of AI, have also had the wind aft.
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