And that's 5!
Wall Street continues to set new records, with the S&P500 (+0.53%) achieving a petit slam: 6th affiliated gain and a 5th record close... but no new intraday zenith.
The Dow Jones rallied +0.3% in the wake of IBM (+9.5%) and Walgreen (+3.3%), a rise held back by Boeing (-5.7%).
Small slam also for the Nasdaq Composite (+0.2% to 15,510), which also posted a 6th rise and an all-time closing record. As for the Nasdaq-100, the initial 0.6% gain was largely wiped out by Tesla (-12.2%), which fell back to its lowest level since May 2023, and also plummeted in the ranking of the world's largest capitalizations, and could even leave the top-ten (Tesla suddenly fell behind Eli Lilly and Broadcom (despite a decline of nearly -2%).
Elon Musk has warned that sales growth will slow this year despite price cuts that are squeezing margins.
Dan Ives, the star analyst at Wedbush Securities, nicknamed the 'pope of technos', lowered his target from $350 to $315 and expressed his dismay: "We were treated to a long explanation of the text on Tesla's long-term vision and a conference call that sounded like complete nonsense".
Paypal also gave up -3.6% after the publication of its results, and in the after-hours, Intel was a big disappointment, dropping -7.7%: the chipmaker reported sales of between $12.2 and $13.2 billion, compared with an expected $14.50 billion.
Worse still, Intel forecasts first-quarter earnings of just 13 cents per share, excluding non-recurring items, whereas analysts were expecting 33 cents per share (this will improve in subsequent quarters).

Visa also saw its quarterly results come in at a disappointing -2.8%... household spending is not supporting the group's business that much.

The S&P500 and Nasdaq were supported - for once - not only by the SOXX (semiconductor ETF down -0.3% this evening), but also by the oil sector (+2.5% on average among the majors), followed by United Rentals +13%, American Airlines +10.3%, Comcast +3.4%, Netflix +3.1% and Alphabet +2.2%.

Within the SOXX, performances were mixed: Western Digital climbed +4%, Cisco +2%, AMD +1.1%... but tomorrow, Intel's fall is likely to weigh heavily.
After this heavy disappointment, followed by that of ST-Micro, ASML's cautious forecasts for Q1 2024.... it's hard to understand to what extent A.I. is helping to boost the results of the leaders in 'high-performance' chips... but perhaps it's only benefiting producers of the 'top of the top' (5 to 7 micron components, handling millions of operations/second).

As for US figures, Wall Street was not disappointed (its 0.5% rise bears witness to this): GDP (gross domestic product) growth for the 4th quarter of 2023 came in +1.3% higher than expected, at +3.3% annualized, according to a very first estimate from the Commerce Department.

Growth in the world's leading economy eased from the roaring 4.9% seen in the third quarter, but should reach 2.5% in 2024, well above the 2% previously forecast.
The increase in the fourth quarter was mainly due to growth in consumer spending and exports. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased', says the Commerce Department.
Surprise, too, on the new single-family home sales front: they rebounded by 8% in December 2023 compared with the previous month, to an annualized rate of 664,000 units, according to the Commerce Department, following a 9% drop in November.

The median home price was $413,200, and the average price came in at $487,300. The inventory of new homes for sale stands at 453,000, representing a reserve of around 8.2 months at the current rate of sales.
Finally, weekly jobless claims were up by 25,000: the Labor Department announced 214,000 new claimants, while the number of people receiving regular benefits also rose by 27,000 to 1.1 million.000 to 1.833Mn in the week from January 8 to January 13.

Surprisingly, these very robust figures (notably GDP) are not worrying the US fixed-income markets, with the 2034 T-Bond erasing -5.5Pts to 4.123%, and the 2-year -7Ps to 4.308%.

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