The Dow Jones fell 0.09% to 36,124.23 points, while the technology-heavy Nasdaq index gained 0.81% to 15,940.30 points and the broader S&P 500 index, 0 , 42% to 4,680.06 points, the latter two at record levels.
The session was animated by "the conjunction of two factors", explained Adam Sarhan, founder and CEO of the management company 50 Park Investments.
On the one hand, the American Central Bank (Fed), whose more accommodating message than expected on Wednesday appealed to investors.
“More often than not, it takes a day for the market to digest” announcements from the Fed, argued the manager.
The US Federal Reserve "has sent a clear message that money will continue to be widely available for a while," said Adam Sarhan.
Sign that the market has postponed the possible deadline of an interest rate hike, the yield on ten-year US government bonds eased Thursday to 1.53% against 1.60% the day before.
Another element of support, the good results of companies, which continued to rain Thursday on Wall Street, with in particular, Wednesday after market close, the video game publishers Take-Two Interactive (+ 4.75%) and Electronic Arts (+ 2.14%), who both raised their forecasts.
"The market has been on its way for four weeks, and it is starting to show signs of stretching upwards, which means the time has come for a little ebb," the manager warned, however.
The indices remain fundamentally oriented upwards, "but in the short term, (...) we can expect a decline" during "the days to come", he announced.
In the table of values, the telephone operators Verizon (-2.06%) and AT&T (-1.51%) suffered after the postponement of the launch of new frequency bands for their 5G network to better assess possible problems of interference with aircraft.
Graphics card maker Nvidia soared (+ 12.04%) after the publication of a Wells Fargo analyst note citing the launch next week of a business platform using the Metaverse, a virtual universe recently popularized by Facebook.
As for the American semiconductor manufacturer Qualcomm, it also hovered over the session (+ 12.73%), propelled by results well above expectations.
The Merck laboratory benefited (+ 2.10%) from the UK marketing authorization for its anti-Covid tablets, the first oral treatment available in the world.
Its competitor Moderna took the opposite path (-17.89%), weighed down by the downward revision of its annual turnover forecast from its vaccine against the coronavirus.
IBM fell slightly (+ 0.48%) while its subsidiary Kyndryl stood on the market for the first time on Thursday, a first inconclusive exit (-7.44%).
The IT group had decided to split into two to isolate certain maintenance and consulting activities which correspond, for the most part, to the pre-cloud model (remote computing), less promising than other IBM businesses.
© 2021 AFP