The Paris stock market showed remarkable stability, with only slight variations on either side of the 7,100 mark.
The 10% mark since January 1 was passed several times during the session, when the CAC climbed above the 7,110 mark.
The same was true of the CAC40 'GR', which posted a +0.8% rise to break through the 20,910Pts barrier.910Pts, 0.5% away from its absolute record of 5/01/2022.

Wall Street is moving higher, with disparate performances as the Dow Jones is content with +0.1%, the S&P500 takes 0.4%, but the Nasdaq posts +1% in the wake of Tesla (+9%).

The CAC is driven by STMicro's +7% rise after the announcement of a 2022 net income almost double that of 2021 (see below).

There was a flurry of US statistics on Thursday, which were well received by the markets.
The 1st estimate of US growth in the fourth quarter came in at 2.9%, right in the middle of the 2.6% to 3.2% consensus (GDP had climbed by +3.2% in Q3).
New home sales rebounded by +2.3% in December 2022, to a seasonally-adjusted annualized volume of 616,000, according to the Commerce Department.
The previous month, sales had risen by 0.7% (revised from the initial estimate of +5.8%).
At 461,000, the inventory of new homes ready for sale at the end of December represented a nine-month supply at the current rate of absorption.

Also according to the Commerce Department, orders for durable goods jumped by 5.6% last month, following a 1.7% decline in November (vs. +2.5% expected).
However, orders for non-aeronautical civil capital goods, a closely watched benchmark for corporate investment projects, fell by 0.1% in December.
Orders for transportation equipment, on the other hand, rose sharply (+16.7%) in December, marking their fourth increase in the last five months.
US jobless claims fell by a further 6,000 in the week to January 16, to 186,000 from 192,000 (revised from 190,000) the previous week, according to the Labor Department.

The four-week moving average - considered a better indicator of the underlying trend in the labor market - shows a week-on-week decline of 9250 to 197,500, again approaching 2019 records.

Finally, the number of people receiving regular benefits rose by 20,000 to 1.675,000 in the week to January 9, the last week available for this statistic.

Bond markets, which were stable this morning, are easing slightly: T-Bonds are +3Pts at 3.496%.
The deterioration is more marked on our OATs (+6Pts 2.665%) and Bunds (+5Pts 2.2080%).

With robust US GDP, 'WTI' oil rebounded by 1.4% to $81.45 a barrel, and 'Brent' to $87.5 a barrel.

The results season, so far disappointing, should also continue to drive the trend, as investors become aware of the impact of the global economic slowdown on corporate accounts.

Tesla (+9%) reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter results last night, but its shrinking profit margins point to an increasingly difficult market environment.

Groups such as Visa, LVMH, Mastercard, SAP, Intel, STMicroelectronics and Nokia are also due to report today.

In company news, STMicroelectronics reported a net income almost double that of 2021, to $3.96 billion, and an operating margin up from 19% to 27.5% year-on-year. Sales of the Franco-Italian semiconductor manufacturer rose by 26.4% to $16.13 billion.

Getlink unveils sales of almost 1.61 billion euros in 2022, an increase of 107% at constant exchange rates compared with 2021, 'setting a new all-time high since the group's creation'.

For 2022, SES-imagotag is forecasting sales growth of 46.4% to 619.1 million euros, the highest level of annual sales in the history of the specialist in electronic gondola labelling for the retail sector.

Finally, Air Liquide announced on Thursday that it had signed a "record" number of 52 new contracts for on-site gas production in the merchant industrial sector in 2022. The number of long-term contracts related to on-site installations signed each year by Air Liquide has thus doubled between 2015 and 2022.

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