Wall St set to open slightly higher, extend weekly gains

Wall Street’s main indexes were set to open marginally higher on Friday, looking to extend this week’s rally on growing expectations of U.S. interest-rate cuts this year.

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq were on course for a fourth straight week of gains, while the blue-chip Dow was on track for its fifth weekly advance, supported by strong quarterly results and slowing inflation data that has bolstered the case for rate cuts from the Federal Reserve.

All three main indexes touched record highs on Thursday and the Dow briefly crossed the 40,000 milestone, before reversing gains and closing in the red.

“(Equities) are just trying to sort of digest the past week’s economic data,” said Robert Pavlik, senior portfolio manager at Dakota Wealth.

“People are now looking at the next catalyst. Most likely it’s going to be whether or not the Fed actually cuts. So you got PCE (personal consumption expenditures) coming up, and if that’s below expectations then probably see the market continue to trend higher.”

Investors will parse comments from Fed officials Christopher Waller and Mary Daly, expected after the opening bell, for further cues on the central bank’s monetary policy path.

Traders currently see a 68% chance of the first rate cut in September, according to the CME FedWatch Tool.

At 08:04 a.m. ET, Dow e-minis were up 6 points, or 0.01%, S&P 500 e-minis were up 1.75 points, or 0.03%, and Nasdaq 100 e-minis were up 18.25 points, or 0.1%.

Advanced Micro Devices gained 2.3% in premarket trading after Microsoft said it plans to offer its cloud computing customers a platform of AMD artificial intelligence chips that will compete with components made by Nvidia.

Reddit rose 13% on partnering with OpenAI to bring its content to ChatGPT.

GameStop erased early gains to shed 23% after filing for a mixed-shelf offering and saying it expects first-quarter net sales to drop from a year ago.

The stock is still set for sharp weekly gains, along with fellow retail investor darling AMC Entertainment, on excitement over the social media return of “Roaring Kitty”, who was the central figure in the 2021 meme-stock rally. – Reuters