A day of euphoria, a historic day with a triple double, an intraday record, a closing record... and all at the best possible time, 48 hours before the '3 Witches'.
Since the beginning of May, it's been obvious: the slightest pretext for seeing the glass as half full is used to euphorize the markets... and if the 'good news' is lacking, then the cyclical 'bad news' (decline in consumption, production, fall in household morale, rise in unemployment) is even more welcome, as it fuels speculation about a rate cut.

Today, Wall Street is soaring to new heights thanks to inflation figures which were in line with expectations... but which 'could have been worse'.
How can you not be permanently delighted by economic data if every time it comes out, traders say 'it's not as bad as expected' (in order to hide the fact that -actually- it's not very good)?

Wall Street's 3 major indices thus shattered (because these were not records "at the margin" this time) intraday and closing records, the 2 being very close indeed as the session ended almost at the zenith (to within 0.1%).

The Dow Jones gained 0.9% to 39,908 points (from 39,935 at the high), the S&P-500 gained 1.2 to 5.308 (almost 1% above the previous record set on March 28) and the Nasdaq soared 1.4% to 16,742 (from 16,750 at its peak), with the Nasdaq-100 exploding +1.5% to 18,596 (from 18,607 at its peak), in the wake of AMD +4.3%, KLA +4.1%, Applied Materials +3.7%, Nvidia +3.3% to $941 (closing record), which saw its capitalization soar to $2.350 billion... and Microstrategy (Bitcoin's 1st private holder) soared +15.9% to $1,503, in the wake of the BTC, which exploded +8%, testifying to a roaring return of risk appetite.

Wall Street was indeed 'reassured' by the 'CPI' (US consumer price index), which came out in line with expectations... but traders feared that 'it could be worse': the 'CPI' slowed slightly -as expected- in April (deceleration 0.3% vs. +0.4% in March) to stand at 3.4% over 12 months, after a score of 3.5% in March.

The 'Core' underlying CPI index (excluding energy and food products) rose by 0.3% month-on-month, compared with a 0.4% increase in March and a consensus of 0.3%, to stand at +3.6% year-on-year after a 3.8% rise in March.

These figures tempered concerns about the acceleration in producer prices, but did not completely dispel Jerome Powell's call for patience on Tuesday, as inflation will take some time to resume its decline towards the 2% mark.

The yield on 10-year US Treasury bonds eased sharply, by -10pts to 4.345% (the '2-year' erased -9pts to 4.73%).
Industrial activity contracted again in May in the New York region, but only to a symbolic extent: the New York Federal Reserve's Empire State index came in at -15.6 versus -14.3 last month.

The new orders sub-index deteriorated to -16.5 from -16.2 in April, as did the number of employees component, which came in at -6.4 after -5.1 last month.

US retail sales were flat on a sequential basis in April, at $705.2 billion, although the slowdown in consumption across the Atlantic is tending to be confirmed, and this also reassures us about the inflationary outlook.

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