Week ahead: Disney results, inflation in focus

It's the ultimate re-opening play: quarterly results from entertainment conglomerate Walt Disney top the Reuters Business Calendar for the week of May 10th.

#1

It's likely to be all "zip-a-dee-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay" at the Walt Disney company when quarterly numbers come out on Thursday.

Most of their major theme parks around the world are reopened, albeit with limited capacity in the U.S. due to social distancing guidelines...

and movie theaters in major cities like Los Angeles and New York are back as well...with limited seating for the time being.

Analysts are expecting revenues to come in at 15.8 billion dollars and earnings to come in at 28 cents a share.

The big thing to listen out for are the subscriber numbers for Disney+, which is riding high on the success of "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" and "WandaVision."

Last time we heard from Disney it had reached 94.9 million subscribers - and that was before Netflix revealed its disappointing subscriber numbers.

#2

Airbnb keeps the reopening theme going on Thursday....

The home-sharing site releases its quarterly numbers...

Giving investors a clue on how many people are now willing to leave their own home to stay at someone else's.

Revenues are expected to come in at 711 million dollars.

Companies like Disney and Airbnb, which are set to benefit from the economic reopening, are on Wall Street's watch list.

Nick Colas of Data Trek Research.

"We think that part of the rotation is the next move in the market. It may not reflect in terms of S&P levels because tech is such an overweight in S&P 500, but we do think those groups will begin to work again as we get more manifestations of the reopening and get to see that earnings leverage really kick in in the back half of the year."

#3

Inflation or no inflation? That's the big question on Wall Street's mind.

Investors will start to get answers on Wednesday with the latest Consumer Price Index.

Economists polled by Reuters expect to see core prices, which excludes volatile food and energy components, show a year-over-year rise of 2.3 percent for April.

Producer Prices follow on Thursday. Manufacturers have already been complaining that prices for everything from lumber to labor has been going up.

And there's one more piece of data to look out for. On Friday, retail sales numbers for April are expected to show consumers kept on shopping.

#4

Ahead of that, it's the art of money...digital money.

Sotheby's will allow buyers to use bitcoin or ethereum to bid and pay for Banksy's "Love is in the air", which goes on the auction block Wednesday.

It's expected to fetch the equivalent of between 3 million and 5 million dollars.

Buyers will have to pay cold-hard-cash for everything else with the hammer going down on art auctions throughout the week at both Sotheby's and Christie's.

#5

Rather bet real money on the next possible red-hot IPO?

Website builder and hosting company Squarespace starts trading Wednesday at the New York Stock Exchange.

Ticker symbol: SQSP.

Squarespace was last valued at 10 billion dollars during a private funding round.