The Paris stock market struck hard this morning, briefly testing the 7,800-point mark (+0.7%) for the first time in its history, before losing some altitude in the second half of the day.

The Parisian index finally ended this "3 Witches" session with a more modest gain of 0.32%, at 7768 pts, benefiting from the performances of Eurofins Scientific (+4.3%), Safran (+2.6%) and Legrand (+1.8%).

The CAC40 gained just over 1.6% over the past week, a gain that has reached 3% since the start of the year.

On the statistics front, US producer prices (PPI) rose by an annualized 0.9% in January, compared with the consensus forecast of 0.6%. On a monthly basis, producer prices rose by 0.3%, against expectations of 0.1%.

Building permits were also disappointing, falling by -1.5% year-on-year to 1.47 million in the USA. Meanwhile, housing starts fell by -14.8% to 1.331 million, after 1.562 million in December (vs. 1.450 expected).

Building permits and housing starts continued to be penalized by high interest rates, even though the latter have eased since their peak, with hopes of a Fed rate cut.

On the bond front, the previous day's gains went up in smoke: the yield on ten-year Treasuries reached 4.31% (+7.5pts and +14pts over the week), while its European equivalent, the Bund, rose to 2.41% (+6pts).

The euro is virtually stable against the greenback, at $1.0775/E, while oil prices are holding steady at $83 in London (+0.2%) despite the International Energy Agency's downward revision on Thursday of its demand forecasts for 2024.

In French company news, Eutelsat reported net income attributable to the Group of -191.3 million euros for the first half of 2023-24, compared with +51.9 million a year earlier, with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 64.1% at constant exchange rates, compared with 73% a year earlier.

EDF announced a return to profit for the 2023 financial year, thanks to the resumption of nuclear production in France against a backdrop of historically high prices. The state-owned energy company generated operating income (Ebitda) of 39.9 billion euros last year, compared with an operating loss of almost 5 billion euros in 2022.

Orpéa (+1.5%) reports that over the full year, its consolidated sales will amount to 5198 million euros (unaudited figure), up +11% on 2022, of which +9.5% is organic.

Sanofi announces that the Japanese Ministry of Health has authorized the manufacture and marketing of Dupixent for the treatment of chronic spontaneous urticaria (UCS) in people aged 12 and over.

Finally, Peugeot states that it is one of the first carmakers to put ChatGPT's artificial intelligence at the service of its customers, with its integration into the emblematic 'i-Cockpit' and its activation via the 'Ok Peugeot' voice assistant.


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