Wall Street is up for the 9th time in a series of 10 sessions, and for the 2nd week in a row... but the key point is that the US indices are already back to their levels of September 14/15, i.e. where they were 8 weeks ago, well before the publication of the 1st Q3 quarterly results.

Wall Street seems to have already turned the page on yesterday's rather hawkish comments by Jerome Powell, who explicitly questioned the effectiveness of the measures taken to bring inflation back towards its 2% target.
In the wake of these comments, the estimated probability of the Fed tightening again in December has risen to almost 15%, compared with less than 5% a week ago, according to the CME Group's FedWatch barometer.

In the wake of the turbulence that rocked the US bond markets on Thursday evening (stable on Friday, with the 10-year stagnating at 4.635%), the saloon doors on the stock market indices have been swinging quite sharply in the last 48 hours.

The S&P500 had lost 0.8% on Thursday (wiping out the 3 previous sessions of gains) before recovering almost twice as much this Friday (+1.55% to 4,415, with the gap at 4,408 closed)... with 90% of stocks up, which says a lot about investors' appetite for shares in all directions.

The Dow Jones gained +1.15% and the Nasdaq Composite almost doubled this with +2.1%.
The Russell-2000 once again underperformed with a mere +1.05%.

The Nasdaq-100 returned to the 15.500Pts (+2.6% weekly and +42% yearly) in the wake of euphoric semiconductors, with KLA +5.6%, Applied Materials +5.3%, Microchip +5.2%, Broadcom +5.1%, AMD +4%, NXP +3.5%, Adobe +3.3%, Intel +2.8%,... and the 'Fantastic 7' did well, with Nvidia +3%, Meta +2.6%, Microsoft +2.5%, Apple +2.3%, Tesla +2.2% Amazon +2.1%, Alphabet +1.8% (6 out of 7 outperform the Nasdaq, and 7 out of 7 the S&P500).

Only one sector remained down on Friday: utilities, with a mere +0.3%.
WTI oil recovered +2.2% on Friday (but has lost 4.5% over the past week), which led to a technical rebound by Devon +3.3%, Marathon and Valero +2.3%.

There weren't many 'macro' indicators to get our teeth into, and the only one published was literally ignored: US consumer confidence deteriorated for the 4th month running, from 63.8 to 60.4 in November, according to the University of Michigan's monthly survey.
The component measuring households' judgment of their current situation fell to 65.7 from 70.6 last month, while the sub-index measuring their expectations dropped to 56.9 from 59.3 in September.

In another area, a CNBC survey of households revealed that 57% of them think the Fed's next move will be a rate hike, versus 43% who are betting on a rate cut (versus 80% on a rate cut for Wall Street professionals).

The dollar (stable at 1.0680/E) also failed to react to the downturn in US consumer confidence, and seems to have lost its safe-haven status over the past week in the face of ongoing conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine.

Copyright (c) 2023 CercleFinance.com. All rights reserved.