Nasdaq, S&P Futures Rise As Microsoft, AMD Earnings Take Spotlight: Will Fed Provide 'Turbo Boost' For Market? Analyst Weighs In

Wall Street is likely to tenaciously hold onto the slender optimism ahead of a slew of earnings from notable companies and the Federal Reserve’s two-day rate-setting meeting that gets underway on Tuesday. Traders appear to be overlooking some negative tech earnings released late Monday as they factor in better performances by their mega-cap counterparts.

Microsoft Corp.‘s MSFT earnings report due after the market close could be sought after by traders to read the tea leaves for the results from its mega-cap peers such as Apple, Inc. AAPL, Meta Platforms, Inc. META and Amazon, Inc. AMZN. Hopes of the Fed confirming that it would begin cutting in September are also buoying sentiment.

Futures	Performance (+/-)
Nasdaq 100	+0.21%
S&P 500	+0.21%
Dow	+0.19%
R2K	+0.35%

In premarket trading on Tuesday, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust SPY moved up 0.23% to $545.99, and the Invesco QQQ ETF QQQ gained 0.23% to $464.97, according to Benzinga Pro data.

Cues From Last Session:

U.S. stocks meandered to a mixed close on Monday as traders turned cautious ahead of the key Main Street and earnings catalysts of the week. The major averages opened higher but gave back their gains and fell into negative territory by early afternoon trading. After staging a recovery in the afternoon, the major indices closed narrowly mixed.

Small-caps, which outperformed in recent sessions, witnessed some profit-taking, dragging the Russell 2,000 Index by over 1%.

Index	Week’s Performance (+/-)	Value
Nasdaq Composite	+0.07%	17,370.20
S&P 500 Index	+0.08%	5,463.54
Dow Industrials	-0.12%	40,539.93
Russell 2000	-1.09%	2,235.33

Insights From Analysts:

Commenting on the FOMC meeting, fund manager Louis Navellier said it is virtually guaranteed that the FOMC statement will signal a key interest rate cut on Sept. 18, premising his expectation on the decline in the two-year Treasury yield from 5.046% on Apr. 30 to 4.385% on Jul. 26.

“So with the Fed finally joining other central banks and cutting key interest rates, the Fed will provide the ‘turbo boost’ that the stock market needs to broaden out further and extend the current rally,” he said.

Wharton Professor Jeremy Siegel, Senior Economist to WisdomTree, said he expects Jerome Powell to indicate the potential for easing of monetary policies in September if the current economic trends continue. “He is unlikely to fully commit to this, as there's a lot of data before that September meeting—but the Fed's confidence in the inflation trajectory should have increased enough to start cutting rates,” the economist said. A steeper 50-basis-point cut is also likely if there is a sharp slowdown, he said, adding that jobless claims data doesn't point to that now.

Upcoming Economic Data:

• The Fed meeting gets underway amid expectations that the central bank will signal its intention to cut rates, beginning in September.
• The results of two separate May house price surveys by S&P/Case-Shiller and the Federal House Finance Agency are due at 9 a.m. EDT.
• The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release the results of its Job Opening and Labor Turnover survey for June at 10 a.m. EDT. Economists, on average, expect, job openings to fall from 8.140 million in May to 8.020 million in June.
• The Conference Board is scheduled to release its consumer confidence reading for July at 10 a.m. EDT. The headline consumer confidence index is likely to have slipped from 100.4 in June to 99.7 in July.

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Stocks In Focus:

• F5, Inc. FFIV jumped over 14.5% in premarket trading following the company’s earnings announcement. The other stocks moving on earnings are Rambus Inc. RMBS (down over 9%), Lattice Semiconductor Corporation LSCC (down over 18%), Sanmina Corporation SANM (down about 8%) and Tilray Brands, Inc. TLRY (up over 8%).
• American Electric Power Company, Inc. AEP, Archer-Daniels-Midland Company ADM, Illinois Tool Works Inc. ITW, JetBlue Airways Corporation JBLU, LGI Homes, Inc. LGIH, Logitech International S.A. LOGI, Merck & Co., Inc. MRK, PayPal Holdings, Inc. PYPL, Pfizer Inc. PFE, Procter & Gamble Company PG, Restaurant Brands International Inc. QSR and SoFi Technologies, Inc. SOFI are among the key companies due to release their earnings reports ahead of the market opening.
• Those reporting after the close include Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. AMD, Arista Networks, Inc. ANET, Caesars Entertainment, Inc. CZR, DoubleVerify Holdings, Inc. DV, Electronic Arts Inc. EA, First Solar, Inc. FSLR, Freshworks Inc. FRSH, Live Nation Entertainment, Inc. LYV, Match Group, Inc. MTCH, Microsoft, Mondelez International, Inc. MDLZ, Pinterest, Inc. PINS, Skyworks Solutions, Inc. SWKS, Starbucks Corporation SBUX and Qorvo, Inc. QRVO.
• CrowdStrike Holdings, Inc. CRWD fell nearly 4% amid the threat of potential legal action from Delta Air Lines, Inc. DAL over the global outage triggered by an update by the cybersecurity company.

Commodities, Bonds And Global Equity Markets:

Crude oil futures fell yet again following losses in the previous two sessions, while gold futures gained ground. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note slipped to 4.169%. Bitcoin BTC/USD retreated toward the $66.5K level.

Hong Kong led the Asian markets lower, as traders reacted negatively to the lackluster close by Wall Street stocks overnight and weak foreign direct investment data released from China. On the other hand, the Japanese, Indian, Taiwanese and New Zealand markets showed modest strength.

European stocks traded on a mixed note, with the U.K.’s FTSE 100 Index slipping amid mixed earnings, while the German and French markets advanced after the eurozone reported better-than-expected GDP growth for the second quarter.

Read Next:

• Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta Lead The Charge As Investors Bank On Tech Cheer For Rally’s Reacceleration: Week Ahead In Earnings

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