CAC40: up slightly just hours before the US jobs report

The Paris stock market gained almost 0.4% this morning, helped by Société Générale (+2.1%), Vinci (+1.7%) and Bouygues (+1.5%).

Caution is still the order of the day, however, ahead of the release of monthly US employment figures, the highlight of the week on the markets.

A weaker-than-expected employment report would reinforce the prospect of at least two 25bp rate cuts between now and the end of the year, or even the hypothesis of more substantial easing.

On the contrary, a better-than-expected report would revive the scenario of a tougher-than-expected labor market, likely to push the Fed to slow its rate cuts, which would be a bearish catalyst for the markets.

If the market revises its expectations downwards in view of the resilience of the employment data, this could be a headwind for equities for some time, in a context where geopolitics is also weighing on sentiment”, warns Alexandre Baradez, Head of Market Analysis at IG France.

The consensus forecast is for an average of 140,000 non-agricultural job creations in September, after 142,000 in August.000 jobs in August, which should confirm the hypothesis that the labor market is losing momentum.

Still on the statistics front, this morning the markets took note of a clear rise in production in the manufacturing industry (+1.6% after -0.2% in July), as well as in industry as a whole (+1.4% after +0.2%) in France, between July and August, according to Insee’s CVS-CJO data.

On Wall Street, futures on the major US indices are currently pointing to a stable opening after yesterday evening’s anecdotal downturn.

Trading remains limited in Asia, where equity markets are partially closed in China for Golden Week.

The trend is negative on the European bond market, where the yield on the ten-year German Bund is tending towards 2.16%.

On the other side of the Atlantic, benchmark bond yields are also trending upwards in anticipation of US statistics, at 3.85% for ten-year US Treasuries.

The euro is stable against the greenback, at around $1.10/E.

The oil market is back at more than one-month highs, with Brend at $78.2/barrel (+0.5%).

In the news for French companies, agrifood group LDC reported sales of 2.98 billion euros for the first half of 2024-25, down 1.2% on a reported basis (-3.9% organically), despite volume growth of 4.9% (+3.6% organically).

emeis reports net income (Group share) of -257 million euros for the first six months of 2024, compared with -371 million a year earlier, and stable EBITDAR (+0.8%) at 339 million, down one point to 12.2%.

Thales announces its participation in the creation by Banque Postale, in collaboration with CB and fintech HandSome, of a bank card for the visually impaired, to be tested for six months from the end of October.

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