It wasn't a foregone conclusion at mid-session... but the rise accelerated from 8pm onwards, and the session came very close to ending in a firework display of records, 3 days before the "3 Witches" session (which would consecrate a 6th month of gains out of 7).

In the end, only the Nasdaq validated the feat, with a gain of +0.75% to 16,511 (vs. 16,428 on March 22).428 on March 22) in the wake of Tesla +3.3%, Qualcomm +2.6%, Intel +1.8%, AMD +1.7%, Micron +1.5% and Nvidia +1.1%.

The S&P500 (+0.48%) stalled just 8pts short of its March 28 record of 5,254... but registered its second-best final score, and the 'SPDR' ETF (SPY) beat its previous zenith of 523.07 by a hair's breadth with a score of 523.30.

The Nasdaq-100 also missed the record by a few thousandths of a % at 16,322 vs. 16.339 on March 22 (though this is the second-best closing in history, with an annual gain of +9%).

The Dow Jones (+0.3%) is still a few thousandths short at 39,558 (vs. 39,807 on March 28 and 39,780 on March 21).
In contrast to the 'big caps', the 'meme stocks' continued to dominate the headlines, with Gamestop surging +130% to $64.8 at the opening (up 60% to $48.7 after +78% the previous day), causing short sellers to take an estimated $5 billion loss on the stock.... without any fundamentally positive news on the stock.
The sharp comments follow one another, with the former SEC chairwoman referring to "furious madness", Wall Street bankers calling for an end to this "mess", and other voices calling for "intervention by the authorities" to put some regulation into what looks very much like market manipulation.

The other 'fact of the day' is that Wall Street overcame Powell's very cautious statements on inflation and, above all, the Atlantic Producer Price Index (PPI) which disappointed expectations at all levels (overall and 'Core' score, then in 'sequential' as well as 'annualized').
The Labor Department reports that the PPI rose by 0.5% on a reported basis, and by 0.4% excluding food (against an expected stability), energy and business services, in April compared with the previous month.
Over the last twelve months, producer prices rose by 2.2% unadjusted (vs. 1.8% in March) and 3.1% excluding food (vs. 2.8% in March).
This will not encourage the Fed to loosen its monetary policy any time soon: the latest statements by US central bank president Jerome Powell, speaking late this afternoon from Amsterdam (a conference organized by the Association of Foreign Banks in the Netherlands), point in this direction.
The FED boss acknowledges that "the decline is slow" and that "we'll have to be patient before the inflation data move in the right direction".
But this is not affecting T-Bonds, which are easing this evening by -3.2pts for the '10-yr' (to 4.4500%) and -3.3pts for the '2-yr' to 4.824%.

A barrel of oil fell sharply, by -1.3% to $78.15... which may have helped temper inflation fears.

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