(News Bulletin 247) – The Paris Stock Exchange is expected to continue its downward movement on Thursday at the opening of a session that is once again very busy on the corporate earnings front.
Around 8:15 a.m., the ‘futures’ contract on the CAC 40 index – expiring in May – lost 27.5 points to 7404.5 points, paving the way for a fourth consecutive session of decline.
The Paris market had concluded Wednesday’s session with a decline of more than 0.8%, to 7466 points, penalized among other things by the heavy dropout of Teleperformance (-14%) following quarterly results deemed disappointing.
The hesitations expressed in recent days, in particular against a backdrop of concerns about the health of banking establishments, show to what extent the recovery achieved since the beginning of the year remains fragile.
In this context, investors will not fail to follow closely, at 2:30 p.m., the first highly anticipated figures for first quarter US GDP.
US growth should have slowed to +2% at an annualized rate over the January-March period, after +2.6% over the last three months of 2022, according to economists’ forecasts.
According to PIMCO analysts, the strength of activity in the United States is explained by the good performance of consumption, itself due to abnormally hot weather and the absence of a resurgence of the epidemic of Covid.
“Momentum lost steam towards the end of the quarter, and weakness in March should weigh on the quarterly consumption calculation for the second quarter of 2023, which we currently expect at 0.5% qoq,” warns however Tiffany Wilding, an economist at the asset manager.
Before this major meeting on the agenda, investors will concentrate
on the rain of results which continues to animate the rating in Europe.
Investors are preparing to experience a particularly dense session on this front, with the publications of many heavyweights such as AstraZeneca, TotalEnergies, Sanofi, BASF or STMicroelectronics.
Among the big names expected today on Wall Street, the performances of Merck, Honeywell and Caterpillar will be particularly watched pending the accounts of Amazon and Intel, scheduled for this evening after the closing.
Yesterday, the New York Stock Exchange had ended on an uneven note despite the good surprise constituted by the reassuring quarterly publication of Microsoft.
The Dow Jones lost 0.7%, but the Nasdaq Composite advanced 0.5%.
On the foreign exchange market, the euro remains in great shape against the dollar, which is clearly weakening but spares itself the breakout of its annual lows, by avoiding contact with 1.1100 against the European currency.
On the bond side, the US ten-year yield is moving around 3.43%, after jumping above 3.45% yesterday.
In Europe, the yield of the 10-year Bund, the euro zone’s benchmark rate,
evolves to 2.41% in the first exchanges, unchanged compared to the closing of Wednesday which had seen it climb strongly.
Oil prices, still affected by the deterioration in the economic outlook, are beginning an unconvincing rebound, the barrel of American light crude oil (WTI) timidly recovering 0.3% to 74.5 dollars.
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