Wall Street retreats sharply, even though the Dow Jones (+0.6%) sets its 3rd consecutive all-time record at just under 41,200. The scale of the downward divergence is out of all proportion to the Dow's advance.

Trade tensions with China cause the S&P500 to fall -1.4% to 5,588.588, and the Nasdaq Composite plunged -2.8% below 18,000 (worst session since the end of 2022) in the wake of the semiconductor sector (ASML -12.8%, Nvidia and Micron -6.6%), not forgetting GAFAMs such as Meta -5.7%.

The Soxx semiconductor index suffered a minikrash of -7.1%, its worst fall since mid-March 2020 (and an abysmal -15.5% on 16/03/2020). Otherwise, the index had lost -4% twice in one week at the end of December 2022 (-4.2% and -4%). The steepest previous declines date back to June 13, 2022 (-5.85%), then to June 16 (-6.1%).

US T-Bonds ended perfectly stable compared with Tuesday, at 4.160%... and no trace of risk aversion, even though the 'technos' have just suffered their worst slump in 20 months.

No reaction to the 0.6% rise in US industrial production in June, announced by the Federal Reserve, with the capacity utilization rate in US industry improving by 0.5 points to 78.8%.

In other news, the Commerce Department reported a 3% rebound in US housing starts last month, with building permits up 3.4%.

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