The New York Stock Exchange opened without direction on Thursday, scalded by another bad indicator relating to the labor market in the United States, which encourages investors to be cautious before the highly anticipated employment report on Friday.
At around 1:45 p.m. GMT, the Dow Jones was down 0.12%, the Nasdaq index was up 0.51% and the broader S&P 500 index was up 0.11%.
“Conditions continue to be unstable today,” Patrick O’Hare of Briefing.com noted in a note.
Illustrating this volatility, Dow Jones and Nasdaq turned around just minutes after the start of trading.
The market was not helped by a new indicator of poor quality, published before the opening.
According to the ADP consultancy, the private sector created only 99,000 jobs in August, significantly less than the 145,000 expected by economists.
“These are the weakest figures since the pandemic” of coronavirus, noted Carl Weinberg, of High Frequency Economics, who nevertheless warned that “weaker employment growth in a slowing economy (was) not a recession”.
“If the labor market slows too much, it could be negative for the Fed (US central bank), which would cut rates more than expected,” explained Peter Cardillo of Spartan Capital.
Traders now assign a 45% probability to the scenario of a half-percentage point reduction in the Federal Reserve’s key rate.
Reflecting these expectations, bond rates eased a little more. The yield on 10-year US government bonds fell to 3.73% compared to 3.75% the previous day at the close.
“It’s going to be a mixed session,” predicted Peter Cardillo.
“It’s been a tough start to the week and September and I see investors taking cover while waiting for the jobs report,” he added on Friday.
Read more
On the stock market, Nvidia (+2.26%) finally rebounded. The star of generative artificial intelligence (AI) had dropped more than 16% in one week since the publication of its quarterly results.
On the other hand, the other big names in semiconductors, Broadcom (-0.42%), AMD (-0.27%) and Qualcomm (-0.24%) fell.
Tesla was in demand (+4.12%) after the group announced the launch in 2025 in China and Europe of its FSD (Full Self-Driving) driver assistance software, subject to the green light from regulators.
Verizon was in the red (-0.70%) after announcing the acquisition of cable operator Frontier Communications for $20 billion. The transaction will allow this descendant of the historic operator Bell to have nearly 10 million fiber subscribers.
Frontier shares fell 9.07%, reflecting a 38% jump on Wednesday after the Wall Street Journal published initial reports of a possible merger.
The start-up C3.ai, specializing in generative AI for businesses, collapsed (-12.65%), despite a turnover higher than expected and a more limited loss than expected.
As a sign of investor nervousness about the sector’s ability to maintain very high growth rates, the market was holding out for disappointment in subscriptions.
The airline JetBlue (+5.86%) benefited from an increase in its quarterly objectives, justified in particular by an increase in reservations, particularly in Latin America.
The New York group says it has also benefited from the postponement of passengers affected by the massive cancellations that hit several companies in July.
They were the result of a computer failure linked to an update of the software from cybersecurity specialist Crowdstrike.
Nasdaq
you have
Related News :