Trading on Wall Street remained at a standstill for the first four hours of the session (the S&P500 was unchanged, the Dow Jones lost 0.2%, the Nasdaq Composite gained +0.1%), before a timid sell-off materialized from 7:30 pm onwards.

Optimists will recall that the S&P500 and Nasdaq set new intraday all-time highs at 6,094.6 (at 7.50pm) and 19,790 (around 6.20pm) respectively. The Dow Jones, which had spent the entire session in the red, ended the day -0.55% down at 44,765, the S&P500 only -0.19% down at 6,075, and the Nasdaq -0.17% down at 19,700.

The Russell-2000, which had narrowly avoided breaking the 2.433 the previous day, and is now moving away from its November 25 record of 2,466.

The Nasdaq-100 dropped -0.31% to 21,425 (from a record high of 21,517), weighed down by Synopys -12.4%, Cadence -6.5%, Microchip -5.5%, Intel -5.3%, Applied Materials -5% and AMD -2%, reflecting the downturn in the 'semis' (the SOXX dropped -1.9%).

No reaction from Wall Street to the day's statistics, despite one pleasant surprise: the US trade deficit fell by 11.9% to $73.8 billion in October, thanks to a 4% contraction in imports and a 1.6% drop in exports.

On the eve of the publication of the NFP, the Labor Department recorded 224,000 new jobless claims.000 new jobless claims in the US last week, up 9,000 on the previous week.

US T-Bonds are unaffected by this rise in unemployment: they could have eased, but ended unchanged at 4.180% and the '2-yr' posted +2.4 basis points at 4.145%.

In a sign of traders' appetite for all assets with strong upside potential, bitcoin broke the symbolic $100,000 barrier for the first time in its history (record raised to $104,000 'round'), buoyed by hopes of deregulation of the cryptocurrency sector with Donald Trump's forthcoming return to the White House. It falls back to 99,400 this evening, retaining a +1.5% lead...

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