The end of May may well prove to be the end of the month at the zenith... a kind of rule that has worked well since the end of the Covid crisis.

Buyers seem to have given up on the US indices with 24 hours to go: the Dow Jones -notably- is down 0.86% (towards 38,110) in the wake of Salesforce (-19.7%) and Microsoft (-3.4%).

The historic index is down for the 6th time in a series of 8 sessions (with no rebound exceeding 0.15%).

The index gained just 0.7% in May, and the situation is likely to become very tricky below 37,700Pts, leaving only a 1% margin of safety.

The S&P500 fell by -0.65% to 5,235, jeopardizing the small short-term support at 5,257: vigilance is now called for, as the index looks ripe for consolidation if Nvidia - the latest driving force behind the rise - stalls after +130%.

The Nasdaq Composite, even if it dropped -1.1% on Thursday (to 16,737), is by no means threatened by a trend reversal, but its successive records (as well as a +7.5% gain in May) are based on the contribution of just one stock out of more than 3,000: the soaring Nvidia, which set a new all-time record at $1,158 on Thursday, for a market capitalization of $2,875 billion.875 billion (before reversing course and consolidating by 3.8% to $1,133%).

The Nasdaq was not the only victim of Nvidia's downturn: other heavyweights also stumbled: Adobe -6.6%, Oracle -5.4%, Micron -4%, Microsoft -3.4%, -2.5%, Alphabet -2.2%.

Other heavy declines included Servicenow -12%, Crowdstrike -9.6%, Dexom -7.2%, Intuit -5.9%, Zscaler and Palo Alto -4.5%, Western Digital -2.5%.

The decline was held back somewhat by Best Buy +13.4%, Lucid +4.7%, Comcast +2.5%, Tesla +1.5%.

Shortly after the close, Dell fell -12% and MongoDB -22% on lower-than-expected forecasts.

Rates eased slightly (-7pts to 4.55%) on the eve of the release of the US PCE (Consumer Price Index, the Federal Reserve's preferred price indicator), thanks to the sharp decline in US gross domestic product.

GDP fell to an annualized rate of 1.3% in the first quarter of 2024, according to a second estimate from the Commerce Department, after a rate of 1.6% indicated in the very first reading.

This downward revision makes the contrast all the greater, given that US growth had reached +3.4% in the last quarter of 2023.

This deceleration mainly reflects the slowdown in consumer spending, exports, and federal and local government spending.

The Labor Department reports that new jobless claims in the US rose by +3,000 (to 219,000) in the week to May 20.

The four-week moving average - more representative of the underlying trend - came in at 222,500, a rather anecdotal increase of 2,500 on the previous week.

Finally, the number of people receiving regular benefits rose by 4,000 to 1,791,000 during the week of May 13, the most recent period available for this statistic.

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