As expected, Wall Street paused on Monday at the start of a week that will mainly be marked by the publication of the latest US employment figures, due on Friday.

At the end of the morning, the Dow Jones index dropped 0.3% to 44.788.5 points, while the broader S&P 500, investors' main benchmark, nibbled 0.1% to 6041.2 points after setting a new all-time high at 6047.4 points.

With a gain of over 0.8%, the Nasdaq Composite also set an all-time high at the start of the session.

December is traditionally a good month for US equities, with the S&P index gaining an average of 2% during the last month of the year.

After the Thanksgiving break, however, some caution may be felt ahead of Friday's jobs report, which could prove decisive for the Fed's monetary policy.

Economists are expecting an average of 200,000 jobs to be created in November, following the 12,000 first-estimate for October.000 announced in the first estimate for October, and on an unemployment rate of 4.2% versus 4.1%.

The statistic - particularly closely followed by the Fed - should help it determine the timing of its next rate cuts, given that traders now place the probability of a rate hike on December 18 at 62%, versus 82% a month ago, according to the FedWatch barometer.

With this in mind, overly vigorous figures could be paradoxically unwelcome by investors worried that the central bank will curb its measures to support the economy.

In the meantime, today's session was enlivened by two better-than-expected indicators in industry, a sector that had been showing signs of sluggishness of late.

The ISM manufacturing index came in at 48.4 last month, up 1.9 percentage points on the 46.5 recorded in October, while economists were on average expecting an index of 47.6.

Published a little earlier, the manufacturing PMI index calculated by S&P Global rose to 49.7 in November from 48.5 the previous month, a level close to the 50 threshold indicating an expansion in activity.

On the stock front, Intel climbed more than 4% after announcing the retirement of its CEO Pat Gelsinger three years after his arrival at the head of the processor manufacturer, during which time the stock lost more than half its value.

On the foreign exchange market, the euro is back on a downward trend amid uncertainty surrounding political developments in France, breaking well below the 1.05 threshold against the greenback.

Yields on US government bonds are rising slightly, with the 10-year rising above 4.22% compared with 4.20% on Friday.

Copyright (c) 2024 CercleFinance.com. All rights reserved.