U.S. stock-index futures edged higher Tuesday, a day after the S&P 500 index and Nasdaq Composite closed at records, as investors sifted through a torrent of corporate earnings reports and prepared for results from technology heavyweights.
What are major benchmarks doing?
On Monday, stocks ended mostly higher, with tech-related shares leading the move to the upside. The S&P 500
SPX,
What’s driving the market?
Corporate results for the first quarter were in the spotlight as one of the busiest weeks of the earnings reporting season got under way, with electric car maker Tesla Inc.
TSLA,
With about a third of S&P 500 index companies reporting so far, about 80% have beaten forecasts, according to FactSet.
“The biggest threat to the positive trend in technology stocks is the reflation trade, which would boost demand for cyclical stocks and move capital from the tech stocks towards the value names,” said Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote.
“But it looks like that migration from growth to value is happening without too much harm for the tech stocks for now, and some digital services, including the cloud business will unlikely be affected by the reflation theme as the end of the pandemic won’t reverse the migration of our data storage to the clouds,” she said, in a note.
The Federal Reserve on Tuesday will kick off a two-day policy meeting at which Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is expected to maintain his stance that interest rates won’t begin to rise until inflation exceeds the Fed’s 2% target.
The U.S. economic calendar features the Case-Shiller home price index for February at 9 a.m. Eastern.
A consumer-confidence index reading from the Conference Board for April is due at 10 a.m.