And that's five! Wall Street continues to set new records, with the S&P500 (+0.53%) achieving a petit slam: 6th consecutive gain and 5th record close... but no new intraday zenith. The Dow Jones rallied +0.64% in the wake of IBM (+9.5%), a rise held back by Boeing (-5.7%).

Small slam also for the Nasdaq Composite (+0.18% to 15,510), which also posted a 6th rise and an all-time closing record. As for the Nasdaq-100, its initial 0.6% rise was largely wiped out by Tesla (-12.2%), which fell to its lowest level since May 2023. Elon Musk warned that sales growth would slow this year, despite price cuts that are eroding margins.

Paypal also lost 3.6% after the publication of its results, and in the after-hours, Intel suffered a big disappointment, dropping 7.7%. Visa's quarterly results also fell by 2.8%, with household spending not providing much support for its business.

The S&P500 and Nasdaq were not supported -unusually- by SOX (semiconductor ETF down -0.3%), but by the oil sector (+2.5% on average among the majors), followed by United Rentals +13%, American Airlines +10.3%, Comcast +3.4%, Netflix +3.1%, Alphabet +2.2%.

In the US, however, Wall Street was not disappointed: GDP growth for the 4th quarter of 2023 came in 1.3 points above expectations, at +3.3% annualized. Growth in the world's leading economy is calmer than the roaring 4.9% observed in Q3, but should reach 2.5% in 2024, well above the 2% previously forecast.

New single-family home sales also came as a surprise: they rebounded by 8% in December 2023 compared with the previous month, to an annualized rate of 664,000 units, following a 9% drop in November.

Finally, weekly jobless claims rose by 25,000 to 214,000 last week.000 new claimants last week, with the number of people receiving regular benefits also up by 27,000 the previous week.

Surprisingly, these very robust figures (notably GDP) are not worrying the US fixed-income markets, with the T-Bond 2034 erasing -5.5 basis points to 4.123%, and the 2-year down -7 basis points to 4.308%.

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