The bullish rally on Wall Street is taking on historic proportions, with the S&P500 up for the 9th time (aiming to close the 4.402Pts) and a 10th for the Nasdaq (for a cumulative gain of +8.5%, which only happens once or twice a decade).
The CAC 40 gained a little over 0.95% and climbed to within touching distance of the 7,100 mark, driven in particular by Schneider Electric (+7.5%) and Worldline (+6.3%).

Investors seem to be completely oblivious to continuing tensions in the Middle East (and the war in Ukraine), and are pinning their hopes on dovish statements from Christine Lagarde and Jerome Powell late Thursday afternoon.

Weekly jobless claims in the US came in at 217,000, down by 3,000 on the previous week's revised level, according to the Labor Department.

The four-week moving average - more representative of the underlying trend - came in at 212,250 last week, up by 1,500 on the previous week's revised average.

Finally, the number of people receiving regular benefits rose by 22,000 to 1,834,000 in the previous week, the most recent period available for this statistic...

After a speech that seemed like a non-event yesterday, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell will speak again today at a conference organized by the IMF in Washington.

While the earnings season is now drawing to a close in the USA, corporate accounts should continue to dictate the trend in Europe, where groups such as ArcelorMittal, AstraZeneca, Deutsche Telekom, Merck KGaA and Telecom Italia have been published this morning or will be later today.
On the oil market, Brent crude prices recovered 1%, to around $80.6 a barrel.
On the bond front, 10-year T-Bonds are trading at around 4.54% (+2pts), the German bund is up 2.5pts at 2.638% and the OAT +1.5pts at 3.215%.

In French company news, Veolia reported strong organic growth (on a like-for-like basis) in profits for the first nine months of the year, with current EBIT up 14.2% to 2.52 billion euros, and EBITDA up 7.7% to 4.79 billion.

For the third quarter of 2023, ArcelorMittal reports a 6.4% year-on-year decline in net income, Group share, to $929 million, and an EBITDA drop of almost 30% to $1.86 billion, although these levels are slightly ahead of consensus.

For the first nine months of 2023, Valneva reported a net loss down 30% to 69.3 million euros, despite a negative adjusted EBITDA rising from 38 to 46 million year-on-year, on total sales down 55.3% to 111.8 million.


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