U.S. stock futures pointed to a mostly flat start for Wall Street on Monday, as investors braced for a busy week of data, and looked for more catalysts to take the market higher following a boost from Nvidia last week.
How are stock-index futures trading
-
S&P 500 futures
ES00,
-0.01%
slipped 2.7 points to 5,098 -
Dow Jones Industrial Average futures
YM00,
-0.08%
fell 49 points, or 0.1%, to 39,139 -
Nasdaq-100 futures
NQ00,
+0.04%
eased 0.75 point to 17,991.50
On Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA
DJIA
rose 62.42 points, or 0.2%, to close at 39,131.53, the S&P 500
SPX
rose 1.77 points, or less than 0.1%, to book an all-time closing high of 5,088.80. The Nasdaq Composite
COMP
fell 44.80 points, or 0.3%, to finish at 15,996.82.
All three major indexes posted gains of more than 1% for the week.
What’s driving markets
Thursday’s big surge for markets fueled by blowout results from Nvidia
NVDA,
gave way to a more tepid session on Friday, though the S&P 500 did manage to grind out a fresh closing high.
“This likely suggests that as the earnings season winds down, market participants are slowly turning their attention back to monetary policy and anything corroborating the view that Fed officials are not in a rush to start cutting interest rates anytime soon could result in a corrective retreat,” said Charalampos Pissouros, senior investment analyst at XM, in a comment to clients.
The week will bring several important data points, including the first revision to fourth-quarter gross domestic product on Wednesday and the Federal Reserve’s favored inflation metric, the core reading of the personal-consumption expenditures index, on Thursday.
“Our economists believe the MoM (month-on-month) core print will be at 0.36% vs. 0.17% last time. This would make it the highest since last January. The fact that last January was 0.51% means that rolling out base effects should help the YoY rate edge down a tenth to 2.8%. However it’s the monthly print that will be all important,” said a team of strategists at Deutsche Bank led by Jim Reid.
Monday will see the release of new home sales for January, due at 10 a.m. Appearances by several Fed speakers will be sprinkled throughout the week as well.
Read: Do stock-market investors care more about Nvidia than the Fed?
