Daily summary: Wall Street slides but finishes year near record highs

• Final trading session of December and the whole 2023 was rather uneventful. Newsflow was light but some markets, like for example US equities, declined with end-of-the-period rebalancing flows playing a key role
• Wall Street indices traded lower during the final trading session of the year. S&P 500 drops 0.3%, Nasdaq declines 0.4% and Dow Jones trades 0.1% lower. Small-cap Russell 2000 drops over 1%
• European stock market indices finished the final trading session of 2023 higher. German DAX gained 0.3%, French CAC40 and UK FTSE 100 added 0.1%, Spanish Ibex moved 0.2% higher while Dutch AEX traded flat
• CHF and JPY are the best performing G10 currencies, while EUR and USD lag the most
• Precious metals are trading lower in spite of a USD weakening - gold drops 0.1%, silver trades 0.5% lower and platinum declines 1%
• Energy commodities trade lower - oil drops 0.2% while US natural gas prices are down 0.4%
• Cryptocurrencies are pulling back. Bitcoin drops 1.8% and trades back below the $42,000 mark. Bitcoin miners stocks are weakest on Wall Street today, with Bit Digital losing more than 18%
• Coffee drops almost 5% after new weather forecasts pointed to a frequent and abundant rainfalls over the next week or two
• Spanish CPI inflation decelerated from 3.2% to 3.1% YoY in December (exp. 3.2% YoY)
• US Chicago PMI slumped from 55.8 to 46.9 in December (exp. 51.0)

GOLD struggles with breaking back above the $2,070 per ounce, but still finished the year above $2,000 per ounce - the first such situation in history. Source: xStation5