The Dow Jones fell 0.63%, the Nasdaq index lost 1.12% and the broader S&P 500 index dropped 0.89%.

Wall Street failed to chain a third positive session after the heat stroke of Thursday and Friday, which had notably seen the Nasdaq gain more than 9% in two days.

"As there has been little news this weekend, it is normal for the market to struggle to find direction," commented Andy Kapyrin of Regent Atlantic.

During the session, Dow Jones and S&P 500 spent some time in the green, after the speech of the vice-president of the American central bank (Fed), Lael Brainard, who explained that she envisaged a deceleration in monetary tightening "soon ".

But the thinning did not last and the three major indices of the New York market all ended quite clearly in decline.

After the end-of-week surge, the Nasdaq stalled, halted in part by the rise in bond rates.

The yield on 10-year US government bonds stood at 3.86%, against 3.81% on Friday.

As for the giant capitalizations of tech, they have, for the most part, lowered the flag, like Microsoft (-2.25%), Amazon (-2.28%) and Tesla (-2.56 %).

Conversely, among the few stocks to float were mainly defensive stocks, that is to say theoretically less sensitive to changes in the economy, such as the Merck laboratory (+ 2.44%) or the Johnson conglomerate & Johnson (+1.57%).

"What I take away from last week is that investors want to buy stocks, but they need a good reason to do so," says Andy Kapyrin.

In this case, it was a lower-than-expected inflation figure released on Thursday that set Wall Street on fire.

For Nick Reece, of Merk Investments, these upheavals testify to a "bear market rally", that is to say a short-lived upward current that is part of a longer cycle of decline.

Peter Boockvar, of Bleakley Financial Group, recalled that in October 2008, at the heart of the financial crisis, Wall Street had recorded several increases of more than 10% in a single session, before plunging again a few weeks later.

"I don't think the movement" observed on Thursday and Friday "is credible," said Nick Reece.

"The preferred path remains that of the decline."

On the stock market, the implosion of the world's second largest cryptocurrency trading platform, FTX, placed in bankruptcy, penalized the entire sector, from the Coinbase platform (-7.56%) to "mining" companies of virtual currency Riot Blockchain (-3.75%) and Marathon Digital Holdings (-2.56%).

"Apart from a handful of stocks that are directly engaged in this space, such as Coinbase, I don't think there is any contagion between the crypto universe and traditional investing, including stocks," Andy said. Kapyrin.

The AMC cinema chain rose (+ 1.94% to 7.34 dollars), the day after an encouraging weekend for the activity of dark rooms, marked by the 180 million dollars picked up at the northern box office -American by "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever", second part of the Marvel and Disney saga.

The American laboratory Opiant Pharmaceutical (+ 113.83% to 20.10 dollars) was propelled by the announcement of its takeover by the British Indivior, for around 145 million dollars.

A small player in health, Opiant made a name for himself with his drug Narcan, capable of blocking the effect of opiates in the body and thus saving a victim of an overdose.

© 2022 AFP