(New York) The New York Stock Exchange ended lower on Friday, after a topsy-turvy week, with investors still alert and wary ahead of the weekend.
The Dow Jones contracted 1.19%, the NASDAQ index lost 0.74% and the broader index S
For Art Hogan of B. Riley Wealth Management, the session was marked by high risk aversion, “because you don’t know what might happen over the weekend” on the banking front.
The first victim of this climate, the American regional bank First Republic, considered the next weak link in the banking crisis, which plunged by 33.00%, after having rebounded by almost 10% the day before.
The announcement on Thursday of the injection of 30 billion dollars in deposits by a group of eleven major American banks into the coffers of this Californian establishment will only have provided its stock price with short-term support.
Within a week, First Republic wiped out 80% of its market capitalization.
While it suffered the most on Friday, its stock symbol FRC was accompanied in the turmoil by other regional banks, including another Californian, PacWest (-18.95%), as well as Western Alliance (-15 .47%), headquartered in Phoenix (Arizona), or the Texas establishment Comerica (-8.44%).
If their slippage was less spectacular, the giants of the sector also suffered a sharp decline. Prominent Dow Joneses Goldman Sachs (-3.67%) and JPMorgan Chase (-3.78) helped drag down Wall Street’s flagship index.
“The volatility we’ve seen this week has been remarkable,” commented Christopher Low of FHN Financial. “And when you have such volatility, it pushes the algorithms to sell. It is therefore not surprising that we see people removing a few chips from the table before the weekend. »
To make matters worse, Friday was a so-called “four witches day”, which corresponds to the maturing of several trillions of dollars of derivative products based on stock market indices or individual stocks.
This deadline often adds volatility to Wall Street in the current session.
Another indicator of traders’ anxiety and appetite for assets deemed safe, prices of US Treasuries soared, pushing rates down, with the two moving in opposite directions.
The yield on 10-year US government bonds fell to 3.43% from 3.57% the previous day.
However, against all expectations, bitcoin pranced (7.34%), although it is theoretically considered a risky asset. It pulled in its wake values linked to the cryptocurrency sector, such as the “mining” specialist Riot Platforms (14.89%) or the Coinbase trading platform (10.62%).
The NASDAQ fared better than the Dow Jones, thanks to a few mega-caps, such as Alphabet (1.38%) and Microsoft (1.17%), still supported by the announcements of the two groups on the integration of artificial intelligence to their products.
Chinese electric vehicle maker Xpeng jumped (6.12%), despite posting a bigger-than-expected quarterly loss and lower-than-expected revenue. The group nevertheless expressed confidence in the resumption of its growth.
Its competitor Tesla fell (-2.17%), as did other manufacturers of electric vehicles such as Rivian (-3.34%) or Lucid (-1.17%).
FedEx paraded (7.97%), after raising its forecast for the whole of the year, despite a disappointment in its turnover for the third quarter of its staggered fiscal year (from June to May). The group expects to have reduced its workforce by 25,000 positions over a year by the end of May.
