The quarter ended on a high note, with 65 stocks closing in the green... but it wasn't a record-breaking quarter, as the Nasdaq was missing out: 2 out of 3 indices ended at the zenith, however, and Wall Street completed its 22nd week of gains (a gain of +25 for the Nasdaq since October 27 - a nice consolation prize).

The S&P500 closes its best 1st quarter since 2019 (the FED had just begun a rate cut and reinstated QE).
The broad index has gained +9% since January 1 (+0.11% to 5,254 on Thursday), setting its 22nd record at the end of the 22nd week of gains.
The Dow Jones (+0.12%) also set a new closing record at 39,807 and gained +5% over the 1st quarter: the 4 largest variations were Disney +35.5% and Caterpillar +24%, while Boeing fell -26% and Nike -13%.

The Nasdaq fell by -0.1% to 16,380), weighed down by On Semiconductors -2.7%, Tesla -2.3%, Meta -1.7%, Apple -1.1%.
The "technos" gained +10% in 3 months, thanks to Supermicrochip +255%, Nvidia +83%, Doordash +40%, Micron +38%.

The worst performers were Tesla -29.3%, Sirius -29%... and Apple -10.8%.

US markets close tonight and do not reopen until Monday: they will take into account the US PCE index to be published tomorrow.

On Thursday, investors discovered the latest estimate of US GDP growth for the 4th quarter: it was revised upwards by +0.2% to 3.4% annualized, according to a third estimate from the Commerce Department.
Growth in the world's leading economy is therefore slower than the 4.9% recorded in the third quarter (Jefferies was expecting the previous estimate to be confirmed).

This revision mainly reflects upward revisions to consumer spending and non-residential fixed investment, which were partly offset by a downward revision to investment in private inventories.
The confidence index calculated on the basis of this household survey rose to 79.4, from 76.5 in the preliminary version, after 76.9 in February.

It was the component measuring consumers' assessment of their current situation that particularly advanced, to 82.5 from 79.4 in February, while the sub-index measuring their expectations recovered to 77.4, after 75.2 last month.

Above all, these results show a deterioration in consumers' inflation expectations over a one-year horizon, now estimated at 2.9% instead of 3% last month.
The Labor Department announced +2,000 new jobless claims in the US for last week (after 212,000 10 days earlier).

The four-week moving average - more representative of the underlying trend - came out at 211.000, down 750 on the previous week's revised average.

Finally, the number of people receiving regular benefits rose by 24,000 to 1,819,000 during the week of March 16, the most recent period available for this statistic.

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