Wall Street took a bit of a beating after the release of the FED's "minutes": the indices lost between -0.3% and -0.6%, before trimming their losses a little in the last 90 minutes of the session.
In the end, the Dow Jones lost -0.5%, the S&P500 -0.25% and the Nasdaq -0.1%.
The "techno" indices ended in the red, despite Moderna's +13.7% surge and the rise of semiconductors such as Analog Devices +10.5%, ON Semiconductors +4.8%, Microchip +3.9% CSX +2.8%, NXP +1.6%, Qualcomm +1%.

Of course, the highlight of May 22 was Nvidia's results: sales soared to $26.05 bn, above the $24.65 bn expected (vs. $22.1 bn in Q4 2023) and management anticipates $28 bn in Q2 2024, data center sales reached 22.6 21.5, earnings jumped +500% to $6.12/share vs. $5.65 expected.
The challenge was to send Nvidia testing the symbolic $1,000 threshold, but the highest price was $997 at 22:22 (+5%): capitalization still jumped by +$100 billion to $2.475 bn (at $990) in the 1st post-earnings trading session... before balancing out at around $980 (+3%).

The Nasdaq-100 finished down -0.05%, as a number of declines weighed on its results, such as Tesla -3.5%, Sirius and Paypal -3.1%, Zscaler -1.6%.

The 'number of the day' (there was only one) provoked no notable reaction: sales of existing homes in the USA fell by 1.9% in April to 4.14 million units at an annualized rate, according to statistics published on Wednesday by the Federation of Realtors (NAR).

Compared with April 2023, when they stood at 4.22 million units, resales are still down by 1.9%.

According to the NAR, the median price of a property rose by 5.7% year-on-year to $407,600, marking a tenth consecutive month of growth and a new record for an April.

The other highlight of the day was the minutes of the Federal Reserve's latest monetary policy meeting (published this evening at 8pm), which contained a few surprises: while Jerome Powell repeatedly stated that the FED's next move "will not be a rate hike" (i.e., obviously a rate cut), some members of the board disagreed with this assertion.
They believe that nothing should be off-limits, and that there should be no hesitation in raising rates if necessary.
The other dissent concerns the pace of quantitative tightening, which was accelerated (more than the market expected) at the last meeting in early May.

These 'minutes' show that FOMC members will probably wait until the end of the summer before cutting the key rate.

According to the CME Group's FedWatch barometer, the probability of a rate hike in the autumn is now estimated at 50.8%, compared with 45.6% a month ago: the consensus is falling back below 50 this evening.

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