Wall Street took a bit of a beating on the release of the Fed's "minutes": the indices lost between -0.3% and -0.6%, before trimming their losses a little in the last 90 minutes of the session. In the end, the Dow Jones lost around -0.5% to 39671, the S&P500 -0.25% to 5307 and the Nasdaq Composite -0.2% to 16801.

The "technos" index ended in the red despite Moderna's +13.7% surge and the rise of semiconductors such as Analog Devices +10.5%, ON Semiconductors +4.8%, Microchip +3.9%, CSX +2.8%, NXP +1.6%, Qualcomm +1%.

Of course, the highlight of May 22 was Nvidia's results: its sales soared much higher than expected, to over $26 billion in the first quarter, and its management anticipates $28 billion for the current quarter.

The challenge was to send Nvidia testing the symbolic $1,000 threshold, but the highest price was $997 (+5%). It nevertheless jumped to $990 in early post-earnings trading... before balancing out at around $980 (+3%).

The 'number of the day' (there was only one) provoked no notable reaction: sales of existing homes in the United States fell by 1.9% in April to 4.14 million units at an annualized rate, according to the National Association of Realtors (NAR).

Another highlight of the day was the minutes of the last FOMC meeting (published at 8:00 p.m.), which contained a few surprises: while Jerome Powell repeatedly stated that the Fed's next move "will not be a rate hike", some members of the board felt that the Fed should leave no stone unturned and not hesitate to raise rates if necessary.

The other dissent concerned the pace of quantitative tightening, which was accelerated (more than the market expected) at the last meeting in early May. These "minutes" show that FOMC members will probably wait until the end of the summer before cutting the key rate.

According to the CME Group's FedWatch barometer, the probability of a rate hike in the autumn is currently estimated at 50.8%, compared with 45.6% a month ago: the consensus is thus falling back below the 50% mark.

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