(New York) The New York Stock Exchange opened lower on Wednesday, continuing its correction movement started the day before, led by giant capitalizations in the technology sector.
Around 9:50 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones was down 0.45%, the NASDAQ was down 0.56% and the broader S index was down 0.56%.
On Tuesday, the NASDAQ dropped 245 points, a first since the end of October. It remained on a jump of 43% for the year 2023.
“We have a correction across all markets,” noted Karl Haeling of LBBW. “We have a small decline in bonds, a strengthening of the dollar, and a bout of weakness in stocks. »
The yield on 10-year US government bonds thus rose again, to 3.98%, compared to 3.92% at close the day before. The price of bonds moves in the opposite direction to their rate.
“The market probably got a little excited at the end of the year,” insisted Karl Haeling. “So we needed a technical correction” to start 2024.
Weaned on news in recent days, Wall Street is awaiting a series of indicators until the end of the week, starting with the ISM index of activity in the manufacturing sector for December in the United States.
Traders will also pay attention to the minutes of the latest meeting of the monetary policy committee of the American central bank (Fed), published Wednesday at 3 p.m. (Eastern time).
Investors are counting on six rate cuts in 2024, a scenario which would require the economy to “degrade rapidly” to come true, says Karl Haeling.
However, for the moment macroeconomic data shows a gradual slowdown in the American economy.
“A soft landing (of the economy) is increasingly conceivable, but it is not inevitable,” wrote the president of the Fed branch in Richmond (Virginia), Tom Barkin, in a text published Wednesday.
Noticing a gap between market expectations and indicators, “some are withdrawing their chips” and reducing their exposure to the market, while waiting to have more visibility, notes Karl Haeling.
The first victims of this withdrawal are the tech stars, who set the New York market on fire last year, notably semiconductor manufacturers AMD (-2.14%), Broadcom (-1.40%) and Qualcomm (-1.16%).
Apple (-0.29%), Nvidia (-0.32%) and Alphabet (-0.11%) were also in the red.
Conversely, so-called defensive values, that is to say theoretically less sensitive to the economic situation, stood out. The Merck laboratory (1.09%), the cable operator Verizon (1.54%) and Coca-Cola (0.47%) were all in the green.
Despite several positive analyst notes, notably from JPMorgan and CFRA, Tesla fell sharply (-3.57%).
The group reported deliveries above expectations on Tuesday, but its Chinese competitor BYD stole the spotlight, becoming, in the fourth quarter of 2023, the world’s leading manufacturer of electric vehicles.
As a crucial deadline approaches, bitcoin is more volatile than ever. It lost 6.76% on Wednesday, after reaching its highest level since early April 2022 on Tuesday.
The American market regulator, the SEC, must issue an opinion any day now on a request for approval of a new investment product in bitcoins, an ETF (exchange traded fund), which should , in the event of a green light, accelerate the adoption of digital currencies by investors.
Cryptocurrency platform Matrixport predicted Wednesday a rejection by the SEC, a decision that would, by all accounts, cause a correction in bitcoin and most major digital currencies.
The leading US cryptocurrency exchange, Coinbase, dropped 3.63%, while “miners” (digital currency creators) Riot Platforms and Marathon Digital Holdings dropped 7.15% and 4.80% respectively.
