After gaining up to 1.3% in late morning trading, the CAC40 ended the day with a more modest gain of 0.59% to 7,240 points. As was the case yesterday, the Paris index surrendered part of its gains in the second half of the session.

With less than 2.2 billion euros traded since the opening, volumes remained limited, and the Paris stock market was buoyed above all by Eurofins Scientific (+2.6%), STMicro (+2.5%) and Alstom (+2.1%).

On the statistics front, sales of existing homes in the US fell by 2.2% last month compared with June, to 4.07 million annualized and seasonally adjusted (SA), according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR).

The median sale price reached $406,700, up 1.9% year-on-year (wealthy buyers who don't need to borrow are still very much in evidence), and the stock of unsold existing homes rose by 3.7% month-on-month to 1.11 million at the end of July, or 3.3 months at the current rate of absorption.

Wednesday evening's release of quarterly results from US chipmaker Nvidia will reveal whether the market's infatuation with AI is still alive and kicking.

Traders are in a wait-and-see mode, looking for the next element likely to lift the indices or, on the contrary, fuel the climate of caution of recent weeks.

With the Jackson Hole symposium starting on Thursday, investors are hoping for an improvement in general sentiment that would enable them to break with the phase of risk aversion that has recently shaken the markets.
In the USA, the trend continues to deteriorate on T-Bonds (+1.5pts to 4.35%) even though only 13% of investors believe in a rate hike in mid-September: the 'problem' (rate tension) is therefore the result of new causes, and this is not reassuring.

The money market expects US interest rates to remain above 5% for most of 2024, which supports the dollar (no prospect of recession, so no rate cuts to come)", explain the DeftHedge teams.

In Europe, OATs and Bunds stalled in extremis at their worst levels of the year (end-February) and a symbolic easing began, with -4.6pts on OATs at 3.20% and -3.6pts on Bunds at 2.67%.

In other French company news, TotalEnergies reports that it has signed an agreement with CapeOmega Carbon Storage, to acquire its 40% stake in the ExL004 exploration permit for CO2 storage (Luna project), in the Norwegian North Sea.

Ubisoft announces a transaction granting it cloud streaming rights for Call of Duty and all other Activision Blizzard titles to be released over the next 15 years, once Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard has been finalized.

Orpea announces a new money drawdown of 200 million euros from its main banking partners, corresponding to the full amount of Credit D1B, following a first drawdown of the same amount on June 2 (Credit D1A).

STMicro, one of the CAC's biggest risers, announced that it had obtained 'NB-IoT' certification from Vodafone for its ST87M01 miniaturized geolocation module.

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