After a long four-day weekend, Wall Street resumed business at a very slow pace: the trend remained indecisive until around 9:30 pm (Paris time), when consolidation prevailed.

The gaps remained insignificant until the end, as witnessed by the Dow Jones (-0.16% to 35,333), the S&P500 (-0.2% to just over 4.550), the Nasdaq Composite (-0.07% to 14,241) and the Russell-2000 (-0.35% to 1,801).

With a month to go before the New Year, the major US banks have begun to unveil their traditional forecasts for 2024 and their targets for the S&P500: unsurprisingly, as they do every year - or almost every year - analysts are expecting +10 to +11% growth, i.e. a target range of 5,000 to 5.100 (less original and more agreed, it seems difficult).

The Thanksgiving weekend provided contrasting signals: online sales were very robust, up significantly on 2022, but the number of transactions was rather disappointing according to the major credit card organizations, which could mean that sales in shopping malls in general and in major metropolitan stores in particular were weak (no precise figures at this stage), which will not make 'Black Friday' 2023 a great vintage.

Shortly after the close, Zscaler's results disappointed (-7% on publication, -6.5% an hour later) despite profits of $0.67 vs. $0.49 expected, and sales of $497m vs. $473m expected.

In contrast to equities (which were gloomy and slightly down), US Treasuries made an excellent start to the week: the '10 yr' eased back by -9 basis points to 4.393%.

Wall Street gave an unemotional welcome to the -5.6% fall in new single-family home sales in the USA (to 679.000 units annualized) in October, after an 8.6% jump in September.

The Commerce Department also reported that the median house price was $409,300 and the average price $487,000 (an all-time record). The inventory of new homes for sale amounts to 439,000, representing a reserve of around 7.8 months at the current rate of sales.

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