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U.S. equity futures nudged lower Friday, while the dollar held at multi-week highs against its global peers, as investors looked to a key reading of domestic economic activity to revive the recent tech-lead rally.
Stocks ended modestly lower Thursday after a pullback in Nvidia (NVDA) , which briefly assumed the title of world’s most-valuable stock, lost momentum towards the end of the session and pulled both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq lower over the final hours of trading.
Megacap tech moves will be key to the market’s performance again today, although investors will also be closely tracking S&P Global’s benchmark PMI reading for the month of June, which is expected to show a modest pullback in both services sector and manufacturing activity while still indicating solid overall expansion.
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The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow reading, in fact, was trimmed to a current quarter growth rate of 3% late Thursday, still more than double the official pace recorded over the first three months of the year.
Wall Street will navigate ‘triple witching hour’ on Friday with the expiry of around $5.5 trillion in equity and ETF options.
Markets will also keep a close eye on the impact of the so-called ‘triple witching hour’, a quarterly event which sees the expiry of options on equity indices, exchange-traded funds and futures.
Around $5.5 trillion in options are set to expire Friday in a move that could ignite the market’s key volatility index, the CBOE Group’s VIX, over the the coming days.
The VIX was last marked 7.8% higher in early trading at $13.45, suggesting traders expect daily swings for the S&P 500 of around 0.84%, or 46 points, over the next 30 days.
Heading into the start of the trading day on Wall Street, futures contracts tied to the S&P 500, which is up 4.16% for the quarter, are priced for a 10 point opening bell decline.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, meanwhile, is called 63 points lower while the tech-focused Nasdaq is set for a 46 point pullback.
Stocks on the move include Nvidia, which is down another 1.7% in premarket trading following last night’s 3.5% slump, as well as chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Micron Technology (MU) , which are down 0.9% and 1.3% respectively.
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In Europe, the region-wide Stoxx 600 was marked 0.87% lower in Frankfurt, but is still on pace for a modest weekly gain, while Britain’s FTSE 100 was down 0.84% following yesterday’s Bank of England rate decision.
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Overnight in Asia, Japan’s Nikkei 225 ended 0.09% lower on the day, snapping a three-day win streak, and ended the week with a 0.49% decline.
The region-wide MSCI ex-Japan benchmark was down 0.8% into the final hours of trading with declines across the board in China, Hong Kong and South Korea.
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