(News Bulletin 247) – Wall Street ended in disarray on Wednesday despite the pleasant surprise of Microsoft’s reassuring quarterly publication. The Dow Jones lost 0.7% to 33,302 points, but the Nasdaq Composite advanced 0.5% to 11,854 points.

Microsoft climbed 7.2% as the IT giant beat consensus on both revenue and profit in its third quarter, largely on the strength of its cloud business.

“Cloud growth and the overall outlook for the June quarter was solid and much better than feared given recent market noise,” Wedbush said.

The broker also believed that the artificial intelligence file was only in its infancy, with ChatGPT leading the race in this area, and that the takeover of Activision should be completed in the coming months, despite a bumpy ride until then.

Moreover, Activision lost 11.4%, the British competition authority having announced its opposition to the proposed acquisition of the video game group by Microsoft for an amount of some 69 billion dollars.

Among the other major publications of the session, investors abandoned those of Alphabet (-0.1%) – the parent company of Google and YouTube – and the Visa credit card group (-0.6%) , and hardly reacted to that of the aircraft manufacturer Boeing (+0.4%).

In macroeconomic terms, new orders for durable goods in the United States rebounded 3.2% in March, but excluding transport equipment, whose orders increased by 9.1%, they rose only by 0.3%.

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