Wall Street is stalling, tech is weakening in the wake of Apple (-4%), and US markets are showing real difficulty in stringing together a series of bullish trends at the start of the year, which had been the recurring scenario since the beginning of August 2024.
Consolidation phases are proving more insistent since the historic zenith of mid-December.
The day's decline remained "technical" after the +1.8% gained the previous day: the Dow Jones shed -0.16% (despite the -6% plunge of UnitedHealth, the index's 2nd-largest weighting behind Apple), the S&P500 gave up 0.2%, the Nasdaq index fell 0.9% in the wake of Apple but also Tesla -3.4%, Nvidia -2%, Alphabet and Amazon -1.2%, Meta -1%.

On the statistics front, it was a very busy day in the United States, resulting in a slight easing of the bond market (the '10 yr' erased -4pts to 4.6140%): US retail sales rose by 0.4% in December, according to the Commerce Department.
This is 2 times less than the +0.8% sequential increase in November (revised from +0.7% in the initial announcement),

Excluding the automotive sector (vehicles and equipment), which is sometimes volatile, US retail sales also rose by 0.4% last month, whereas Bank of America was expecting a 0.6% increase.
On the employment front, the Labor Department reported 217,000 new jobless claims in the US in the week to January 6, up 14,000 on the previous week.
But activity in the manufacturing sector is recovering vigorously (with a historic rise in the 'Philly-FED', the strongest since June 2020) in the Philadelphia region, according to the index calculated by the local Fed, which rises from a revised reading of -10.9 in December to +44.3 in January, its highest level since April 2021.

Among the components of the overall index, the new orders (+47 points to 42.9) and current shipments (+39 points to 41) indices are once again advancing strongly, reaching their highest levels since November 2021 and October 2020 respectively.

On the inflation front, import prices recorded a rise of 0.1% in December for the third consecutive month, a figure which shows that inflationary pressures now seem to be better under control in the United States... but beware, the devil is in the detail.

The Labor Department points out that import prices have not risen by more than 0.1% since April 2024, but food and beverage prices accelerated in December to 2.8%, compared with 1.4% in November (a doubling).
On an annualized basis, i.e. over a sliding 12-month period, import prices posted a gain of 2.2%, their strongest increase since December 2022.

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