Wall Street begins March in volatile mode

Wall Street started March in volatile mode, with its main indicators dancing between red and green, after having closed four consecutive months of increases on Thursday and the Nasdaq having its best month in two years.

Two minutes after the trading floor opened, the Dow Jones lost a slight 0.01% and stood at 39,040 points, although in the previous moments it had registered small increases.

In the same variable way, the selective S&P 500 rose 0.12%, to 5,110 units, and the technological Nasdaq grew 0.18%, to 16,121 points.

The markets face this March with their eyes set on the direction of inflation and the consequent measures of the Federal Reserve (Fed) about a possible lowering of interest rates.

On Thursday, the price index for personal consumption expenditures (PCE) was released, a key data that guides the monetary policy of the Federal Reserve, which marked a 2.4% year-on-year increase in January, according to the Office of Economic Statistics (BEA).

This data shows a decrease of two tenths in relation to the interannual PCE of December.

Also on Thursday, the weekly number of new unemployment benefit applications was released, which last week was 215,000, that is, 13,000 more than the adjusted data from the previous week, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS, in English), another data that usually serves as a thermometer on the health of the American economy.

By sector, the fall in public services (-1.62%) and essential goods (-0.57%) stood out, while those that showed the best face were energy (1.11%) and technology ( 0.37%).

Among the 30 Dow Jones stocks there were no major movements this Friday, with almost all companies showing slight variations of less than one percentage point, with the exception of United Health (-2.59%), Nike (-1.45%) and Honeywell (-1.06%).

It also highlighted the fall of more than 25% in the shares of the American regional bank NYCB after the entity announced an “internal controls” problem and the change of its CEO.