New York (AFP)

Wall Street finished sharply in the green on Wednesday, confirming its excellent start to September and benefiting from the good health of several tech giants.

The Nasdaq, with strong technological coloring, reached a record by taking 0.98% to 12,056.44 points, exceeding for the first time the threshold of 12,000 points.

The extended S&P 500 index also hit an all-time high, gaining 1.54% to 3,580.84 points.

For its part, the flagship index of the New York market, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, climbed 1.59% to 29,100.50 points, approaching just over 400 points from its February record.

For Art Hogan of National Holdings, the market is driven by three main factors: optimism around a vaccine or an effective treatment against the coronavirus, the hope of a parliamentary compromise in the United States on a new program budget support and better than expected economic data.

On Tuesday, the good figures for manufacturing activity, which reached its highest level for nine years in China in August and continued to recover in the United States over the same period, had already carried Wall Street.

On Wednesday, the disappointing figures for job creation in the private sector in the United States in August, with 428,000 new positions, according to the survey by the business services firm ADP, did not shake the US stock market.

The number of private jobs created last month was up from July, but was far below analysts' expectations (+1.2 million).

These data "are not always correlated with the weekly figures on applications for unemployment benefit" published Thursday, explains Mr. Hogan to justify the lack of reaction from the market.

In addition, Wall Street on Wednesday profited from the still Olympic form of several of the pillars of the tech, Amazon rising by 0.92%, Facebook by 2.39% and Alphabet (the parent company of Google and YouTube) by 3.76 %.

Apple, the group that is the most expensive on Wall Street and whose action was divided by four at the beginning of the week, however fell 2.07%.

Within the Dow Jones, Coca Cola (+ 4.21%) and IBM (+ 3.87%) posted clear increases.

In the bond market, the 10-year rate on US debt fell around 8:35 p.m. GMT, settling at 0.6461% against 0.6689% on Tuesday evening.

© 2020 AFP