Wall Street’s main indexes notched a third consecutive gain on Tuesday, with the benchmark S&P 500 closing at a two-week high as fresh signs of cooling consumer demand stoked bets that the Fed could soon start cutting borrowing costs.
Investors will parse data from weekly jobless claims for the week ending November 22 and a delayed September durable goods report, scheduled for 8:30am.
The central bank’s snapshot of economic conditions, the Beige Book, is due at 2pm ET.
“Tuesday’s data isn’t awful, but soft enough to enable the Fed to consider easing rates further, even if just as a precautionary measure in case the labor market has deteriorated further in the past few months,” said Daniela Hathorn, senior market analyst at Capital.com.
Recent dovish signals from key Fed officials had already added to the odds of a 25-basis-point rate cut next month to 84.9%, roughly double last week’s chances, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch Tool.
At 7.05am, Dow E-minis were up 32 points, or 0.07%, S&P 500 E-minis were up 11.5 points, or 0.17%, and Nasdaq 100 E-minis were up 63.25 points, or 0.25%.
Investors were also weighing a report suggesting White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett was a frontrunner to be the next Fed chair, at a time when political influence in monetary policymaking has been a concern.
Wall Street’s recent recovery from a tech-led selloff earlier this month has trimmed monthly losses on the main indexes.
It would still be their biggest monthly losses since the US tariff rout earlier this year.
However, tech overvaluations still remain a concern and the S&P 500 technology index has borne the brunt of it with a 6% monthly decline.
Lifting some of the gloom on Wednesday was a 2.9% rise in Dell in premarket trading after its quarterly forecasts surpassed expectations, supported by strong demand for its servers in AI data centres.
Traders were also heading into a busy holiday shopping period starting with the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday, followed by Black Friday and Cyber Monday.
The period will be crucial for big-box retailers that will be catering to customers navigating tariff-induced price pressures and corporate layoffs.
Results and forecasts from retailers such as Walmart and Target have been mixed even as the National Retail Federation expects this year’s holiday sales to top US$1 trillion for the first time.
Among other stocks, HP fell 4.8% after the personal computer maker unveiled dour profit forecasts and announced job cut plans.
Signs of increasing competition in the AI-chip sector following an Alphabet-Meta deal weighed on shares of Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, down over 1% each.
Alphabet’s shares were up 1.3%, bringing it close to a US$4 trillion market valuation.