Markets Wait for Key Economic Data
Pre-market futures are mixed to start a holiday-shortened week. This follows the Nasdaq notching a new closing high prior to Memorial Day weekend. The S&P 500 and Dow also closed higher Friday, though the Dow still has a ways to go to re-capture 40K. Currently, the Dow is -33 points, the S&P is +8 and the Nasdaq — still the leader among major indices — is up +55 points at this hour. the 2-year bond yield is ticking toward 5%, currently 4.925%, and the 10-year is at 4.465%.
We’ll close this week with the all-important Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) on Friday morning. It will more or less complete this month’s main economic data releases; the following week, we’re already back at Jobs Week again. PCE year over year last time around came in at +2.7% headline and +2.8% on core. Income and spending are expected to have come down measurably month over month. As PCE data is largely culled from other economic metrics elsewhere, we know consumer spending has begun to slow. (Look no further than Memorial Day weekend’s weak box office receipts.)
Also, we still have some key quarterly earnings reports expected this week. Salesforce CRM, Dell DELL, Hewlett Packard HPQ and C3.ai AI join retailers like Costco COST, Best Buy BBY, Dollar General DG and Kohl’s KSS. We’ll be all but finished with S&P 500 calendar Q1 reportage by the end of this week. One notable company reporting today, after the closing bell this afternoon, is enterprise cloud-solutions firm Box Inc. BOX. Shares are down -18% from near-term highs in early March.
Case-Shiller home prices are out ahead of today’s open. On the 20-city survey — where all 20 gained in aggregate year over year — came in slightly ahead of estimates at +7.4%, and 10 basis points (bps) higher than the previous month. San Diego led the way, +11.1%, followed by New York City +9.2% and Cleveland at +8.8%. It’s the ninth-straight month of higher home prices, though this is backward-facing data: today’s report accounted for March of this year. We’ll see where the housing market has moved in subsequent months.
Consumer Confidence comes out after today’s open, for the month of May. Expectations are for this number to tick down to 96.0 from 97.0 a month ago. We’ll also head from Fed Governor Lisa Cook and San Francisco Fed President Mary Daly about the state of considerations for moving interest rates. If they’re at all like Minneapolis’ Neel Kashkari, they’ll also state that they are in no hurry to lower rates from the 5.25-5.50% range they’ve been in since July of last year.
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Box, Inc. (BOX) : Free Stock Analysis Report
