Wall Street ends up, driven by Goldman Sachs and Moderna

Wall Street finished in the green on Wednesday, despite a decline in the second half of the session, in a market enthusiastic by the quarterly results of the bank Goldman Sachs and reassured by an announcement by biotech Moderna on the development of a vaccine against the coronavirus .

Its flagship index, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, chained its fourth consecutive session of increase, finishing at 26,870.10 points (+ 0.85%).

The Nasdaq, with a strong technological coloring, gained 0.59% to 10,550.49 points. The broad S&P 500 index gained 0.91% to 3,226.56 points.

The investment bank Goldman Sachs (+ 1.35%) largely exceeded expectations in the second quarter thanks in particular to the surge in its brokerage activities on financial markets hit by the pandemic since the start of the year. The establishment notably generated a net profit of 2.25 billion dollars (1.97 billion EUR), up 2% year-on-year.

For its part, Moderna (+ 6.90%) announced Tuesday that it would enter July 27 in the final phase of its clinical trials for a vaccine against Covid-19, in order to test the effectiveness of the latter in real conditions.

The announcement was made shortly after the publication in the New England Journal of Medicine of the results of the first phase of the Moderna trial, according to which the experimental vaccine had raised antibodies against the coronavirus in all participants, number of 45.

The New York place however skated after mid-session as the Nasdaq and the S&P 500 approached their respective records. “The market seems to hesitate to go beyond these levels,” notes Peter Cardillo of Spartan Capital Securities. According to the expert, the main reason for these procrastinations continues to be the alarming number of new coronavirus contaminations in the United States, where the pandemic is progressing strongly in the South and West. The death toll is expected to increase by 15,000 by August 1, according to an average of 23 research group models released Tuesday by a team from the University of Massachusetts. But according to one of these models, the almost widespread wearing of the mask, still very controversial in the United States, could save 40,000 lives by November. Among the indicators, industrial production in the United States continued to climb in June, for the second month in a row, at 5.4%, exceeding analysts’ expectations, according to data published by the Federal Reserve. Manufacturing activity in the New York region returned to growth in July, after four months of decline due to the pandemic, according to the monthly Empire State index. On the bond market, the 10-year rate on the American debt rose to 0.6316% around 8.15 p.m. GMT, against 0.6233% on Tuesday evening.