After a long 4-day weekend, Wall Street resumed business at a modest pace: the trend remained indecisive until around 9:30 p.m., when consolidation prevailed.

Gaps remained insignificant until the end, as witnessed by the Dow Jones -0.16%, S&P500 -0.2% (4,550), Nasdaq -0.07%, Nasdaq -100 -0.1%, Russell-2000 -0.35% (at 1.800Pts).

With 1 month to go to the New Year, the major US banks have begun to unveil their traditional forecasts for 2024 and their targets for the S&P500: unsurprisingly, as they do every year - or almost every year - analysts are expecting +10 to +11% growth, i.e. a target range of 5,000 to 5,100 (less original and more agreed, that seems difficult).

The Thanksgiving weekend provided mixed signals: online sales were very robust, up significantly on 2022, but the number of transactions was rather disappointing according to the major credit card organizations, which could mean that sales in shopping malls in general and in big-city stores in particular were weak (no precise figures at this stage), which will not make Black Friday 2023 a vintage year.

Shortly after the close, Zscaler's results disappointed (-7% on publication, -6.5% 1 hour later) despite profits of $0.67 vs. $0.49 expected, and sales of $497 million vs. $473 million expected.

Unlike equities (which were gloomy and slightly down), US Treasuries made an excellent start to the week: the '10 yr' eased by -9pts to 4.393%.

Wall Street gave an unemotional welcome to the -5.6% fall in new single-family home sales in the United States (to 679,000 units at an annualized rate), following an 8.6% jump in September.

The Commerce Department also reported a median home price of $409,300 and an average price of $487,000 (an all-time record).
The inventory of new homes for sale stands at 439,000, representing a reserve of around 7.8 months at the current sales rate.

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