(CercleFinin.com) - It wasn't a foregone conclusion at mid-session... but the rise accelerated from 8:00 p.m. onwards, and the session came very close to ending in a firework display of records, three days before the "3 Witches" session (which would consecrate a sixth month of gains out of seven).

In the end, only the Nasdaq Composite validated the feat, with a gain of +0.75% to 16,511 (vs. 16,428 on March 22).511 (vs. 16,428 on March 22) in the wake of Tesla +3.3%, Qualcomm +2.6%, Intel +1.8%, AMD +1.7%, Micron +1.5% and Nvidia +1.1%.

The S&P500 (+0.48% to 5.247) stalled just eight points shy of its March 28 record... but registered its second-best final score, and the 'SPDR' ETF (SPY) beat its previous zenith at 523.07 by a hair's breadth with a score of 523.30. The Dow Jones (+0.3%) is still a little short at 39,558 (vs. 39,807 on 28/03 and 39,780 on 21/03).

In contrast to the big caps, meme stocks continued to dominate the headlines, with Gamestop surging +130% to $64.8 at the opening (+60% to $48.7 after +78% the previous day), causing short sellers to incur an estimated loss of $5 billion... without any fundamentally positive news on the stock.

The sharp comments followed, with the former SEC chairwoman referring to "a raging madness", Wall Street bankers calling for an end to this "mess", and other voices calling for "intervention by the authorities" to put some regulation into what looked very much like market manipulation.

Wall Street overcame a disappointing Producer Price Index (PPI) across the board. On an annual basis, US producer prices rose by 2.2% in April (vs. 1.8% in March) and by 3.1% on an underlying basis (vs. 2.8% in March).

This will not encourage the Fed to loosen its monetary policy any time soon: the latest statements by central bank Chairman Jerome Powell, speaking late this afternoon from Amsterdam, were in fact along these lines.

He acknowledged that "the decline is slow" and that "we're going to have to be patient before the inflation data go in the right direction". But this did not affect T-Bonds, which eased -3.2 basis points for the '10-year' to 4.45%.

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