Something snapped on Wall Street this Friday: after five sessions of fairly steep declines in tech stocks, investors didn't come to pay for the lows as they usually do since the end of October.

On the contrary, they turned into panic sellers, like Nvidia, which literally plummeted (-10%, the red lantern of the S&P500 and Nasdaq-100) with the break of the $830 major support level.

Nvidia played a large part in the air pocket on the SOXX (-4%), which was already in very bad shape with -9% in five sessions (since April 11). The main barometer of semiconductors has sunk into a downward spiral: -9% on a weekly basis and -18% since March 8.

The S&P500 thus fell by nearly 0.9% to 4,967, but this was a benign decline compared to that of the Nasdaq Composite, which tumbled by over 2% to 15,282, or -5.6% on the week, the worst since mid-January 2022.

Nvidia was not the only champion of the first-quarter rally to fall, as Netflix also plunged -9% (the day after its quarterly publication), AMD -5.5%, Marvell Techno -4.8%, Micron -4.6% and Broadcom -4.3%.

The Dow Jones followed an opposite trajectory, gaining nearly 0.6% to 37,986, supported by American Express +6.2% (after its quarterly publication), JP Morgan Chase +2.6%, Amgen +2.4% and Coca-Cola +2%.

The final scores observed on Wall Street would have surprised no-one this Friday morning, with Israeli drone strikes on Iranian soil (military target in the vicinity of Isfahan)... but an apparent serenity returned as the hours went by.

As the risk-off dissipated, the initial easing in yields came to a halt at the end of the morning, and the afternoon saw renewed tension in the US bond market (which had ceased to be a safe haven on the eve of the weekend).

The yield on 10-year US Treasuries, which had fallen back in the morning, climbed back to 4.63%, close to 4.65% (its worst level since November), while the 2-year continued to flirt with 5.00% (at 4.99%).

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