The Paris stock market experienced a small episode of heaviness, ending the session down 0.48% at 7,535 points, penalized in particular by TotalEnergies (-1.7%) and Engie (-1.3%), while the market was literally deserted by investors, with barely 1.6 billion euros traded during the day.

The lack of activity typical of the holiday season does not call into question the quality of the 2023 stock market vintage, as the CAC is on course for an increase of around 17% this year.

The Paris market has been taking a break for several days, in skeletal volumes, following a series of record highs a fortnight ago in the wake of the Fed's change of strategy.

Unlike in the US, where the surge of the "Magnificent Seven" - AI-related stocks such as Apple and Microsoft - boosted the trend, the 2023 uptrend benefited almost all European sectors.

With a 30% gain this year, the European technology sector remains the big winner of 2023, ahead of industry (+29%) and agri-food (+26%).

This optimism has, however, been tempered by concerns over the apparent slowdown in growth, which in recent weeks has led many analysts to adopt a more cautious approach for 2024.

In a context marked by the absence of a large proportion of investors, a few figures published this afternoon in the US failed to liven up trading: the Labor Department announced 218,000 new jobless claims in the US for the week of December 18, a figure up by 12.000 on the previous week's revised figure (206,000 vs. 205,000 initially announced).

The four-week moving average - more representative of the underlying trend - came out at 212,000 last week, virtually stable (-250) on the previous week's revised average.

Finally, the number of people regularly receiving benefits rose by 14,000 to 1,875.000 in the previous week, the most recent period available for this statistic.

The US goods trade deficit widened to -$90.3 billion last month, from -$89.6 billion in October, as exports (-3.6%) fell more than imports (-2.1%) month-on-month.

The Commerce Department, which published these preliminary estimates, also reported that inventories had fallen by 0.2% in wholesale trade and by 0.1% in retail trade.

Finally, promised new home sales were unchanged in November, but were down -5.2% year-on-year.

Despite the good shape of the equity markets, government bond yields remain on a downtrend, continuing the trend seen since the end of October, fuelled by optimism about monetary policy developments.

The yield on the German Bund and our OATs remains stable, while that on T-Bonds is down slightly by +3pts to 3.818%.

On the foreign exchange market, the euro remains stable against the dollar (at $1.110/E) and looks set to test its summer high of 1.1250 on July 14.

Note that gold - the inverse reflection of the greenback - is up 0.8% to reach new all-time highs of around $2075 per ounce.

In other French company news, Safe reports that its management began a full audit of the group on December 18, with a view to preparing a draft recovery plan, with the assistance of the court-appointed administrator, for presentation to the Pontoise Commercial Court.

Les Constructeurs du Bois announces the success of its capital increase with preferential subscription rights, for an amount of one million euros, at a unit price of 3.50 euros, resulting in the creation of 285,714 new shares.


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