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Stock futures pointed to consolidation for Wall Street on Wednesday, after a whipsaw start to the week that has seen major indexes surrender sizable gains, only to claw them back, amid COVID-19 pandemic-related newsflow.
How are stock-index futures trading?
-
S&P 500 futures
ES00,
-0.19%
slipped 0.1% to 4,633 -
Dow Jones Industrial Average futures
YM00,
-0.08%
were down less than 0.1% at 35,352 -
Nasdaq-100 futures
NQ00,
-0.36%
fell 0.3% to 15,925
On Tuesday, the Dow industrials
DJIA,
surged 560.54 points, or 1.6%, to end at 35,492.70, the best daily percentage gain since Dec. 6, according to Dow Jones Market Data. The S&P 500
SPX,
advanced 1.8% to 4,649.23, and the Nasdaq Composite
COMP,
climbed 2.4% to 15,341.09.
What’s driving the markets?
Tuesday’s rally marked the best daily percentage gain for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite since Dec. 7, and gains more than made up for Monday’s selloff. But the Wall Street rebound was followed up by mostly lackluster trading in Asia and Europe so far.
Investors took heart Tuesday from comments by President Joe Biden, who rolled out a plan to tackle the highly contagious omicron coronavirus variant, with 500 million free testing kits and a promise there would be no March 2020 style lockdowns.
“Stock traders believe the new strain’s consequences will be short-lived and less damaging to the American economy. This is because corporate balance sheets are on solid footing, and investors believe that the United States will be able to navigate through this period unharmed,” said Naeem Aslam, chief market analyst at AvaTrade, in a note to clients.
Medical experts in South Africa have said a noticeable recent drop in new COVID-19 cases could signal the omicron-driven surge has passed its peak. That, of course, doesn’t mean waves in other countries will follow that pattern.
And the holiday season remains complicated by the new variant that is causing case spikes in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere. Dr. David Powell, physician and medical adviser to the International Air Transport Association, warned that the new variant increases the risk of catching COVID-19 during a flight by two or three times, in an interview with Bloomberg that published late Tuesday.
Read: Canceling your Christmas travel plans because of COVID-19? How to avoid wasting time — and money
As a shortened week winds down, investors will be dealing with a heavy batch of economic data. Revised U.S. third-quarter gross domestic product data are due at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time, with the Conference Board’s consumer confidence survey and existing home sales coming at 10 a.m. Eastern. Thursday will see another big data dump.
Among other assets, oil prices
CL00,
BRN00,
were trading modestly higher ahead of official inventory data from the Energy Information Administration on Wednesday morning.
Read: API data show U.S. crude-oil inventories down 3.7 million barrels last week: sources
