The Paris Bourse is set to open slightly higher on Friday morning, as it awaits the monthly US employment report, an event that promises to determine the timing of future Fed rate cuts.

At around 8:15 a.m., the future contract on the CAC 40 index - expiring at the end of the month - climbed five points to 7449 points, showing that investors are timidly hoping for pleasant surprises.

After dropping 0.9% on Tuesday, then 1% on Wednesday, the Paris market continued its slide yesterday, shedding 0.9% to 7,431 points, thus falling back below its 7,500-point support, notably under the weight of luxury stocks.

For the week as a whole, the CAC is currently down 2.6%, confirming September's unfortunate reputation as the worst month of the year for stock market indices.

"We expect September to continue to be a turbulent month", warns Christopher Dembik, Investment Strategy Advisor at Pictet AM.

"No stock is safe, not even Hermès. However, it's rare to find the luxury goods group at the top of the CAC 40's list of decliners', stresses the analyst.

'What's perhaps worrying this year is the level of liquidity, which remains abnormally low for the season', he adds.

'Lower liquidity means greater volatility', continues the strategist. This calls for caution in the short term", he concludes.

The trend is likely to remain volatile until the US employment figures for August are released at 2:30 p.m.

Investors have realized that employment has become the main factor on which the Fed's next decisions will depend, starting with the extent of its next rate cuts, which are likely to dictate the trend of the coming months on the financial markets.

Currently, on the US futures market, the probability of a 50 basis point Fed rate cut this month is assessed at 41%, while it stands at 59% for an easing of just 25 basis points.

Economists are expecting 165,000 new jobs to be created over the past month, compared with 114,00 in July, with the unemployment rate stable at 4.3%.

Poor labor market figures would also rekindle fears of a "hard landing" for US growth, or even a slide back into recession, a scenario fuelled by the mixed economic indicators published in recent weeks.

The jobs report is all the more anxiously awaited since the last one was so disappointing, leading to a sharp correction in stock market indices.

The big question is whether this disappointment was just a blip, or the start of a deterioration that could be much more serious", asks Jim Reid, market analyst at Deutsche Bank.

Wall Street finished mixed on Thursday, with cheap buying in technology stocks offsetting contrasting labor market data, including the latest ADP survey, in a generally wait-and-see market ahead of monthly employment figures.

Cautious equity markets continue to push bond yields down, but here too, a wait-and-see attitude remains the order of the day.

Ten-year US Treasury yields are hovering around 3.73%, in a narrow range pending the employment figures, while Bund yields of the same maturity are stabilizing at 2.20%

The oil market is also awaiting the statistics, with Brent crude edging up 0.2% to $72.8 a barrel.

Still buoyed by yesterday's announcement of a drop in weekly oil inventories in the United States, light Texas crude (West Texas Intermediate, WTI) also advanced by 0.2% to $69.3.

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