Here are the most important news, trends and analysis that investors need to start their trading day:
1. Stock futures lose steam as 10-year Treasury yield hits a three-year high
Traders on the floor of the NYSE, April 7, 2022.
Source: NYSE
Wall Street was set for a mixed open Friday. U.S. stock futures lost steam as the 10-year Treasury yield pushed to a three-year high after the Federal Reserve signaled earlier in the week that more aggressive measures are needed to fight inflation. Tech stocks took the brunt of the accompanying rise in Treasury yields, sending the Nasdaq down more than 2.5% through Thursday’s close, on pace to break a three-week winning streak. The S&P 500 was also tracking for its first weekly loss in four weeks, down 1% from Monday to Thursday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped nearly 0.7% for the week so far, which would be its second straight weekly loss. Next week, the banks kick off the latest quarterly earnings season.
2. Bond yields continue Fed-driven rally; oil headed for weekly losses
The 10-year Treasury yield ticked higher Friday, topping the prior day’s 2.667% high back to March 2019 and keeping it higher than the 2-year yield. They inverted last week for the first time since 2019. Another key Treasury yield spread — the 5-year/30-year — remained on either side of inverted Friday after flipping last week for the first time since 2006. The inversions are significant because they have historically happened before economic recessions.
U.S. oil prices inched higher Friday, but remained below $100 per barrel. West Texas Intermediate crude fell more than 3% so far this week following last week’s roughly 13% decline as the U.S. announced its largest-ever release from its Strategic Petroleum Reserve and International Energy Agency member nations joined the effort to combat soaring oil and gasoline prices.
3. Russian rocket attack on Ukraine train station kills over 30 people
A Russian rocket attack on a railway station in eastern Ukraine on Friday killed more than 30 people and wounded more than 100 others. The station was packed with evacuees waiting to travel to safer parts of the war-torn country. Ukrainian leaders warned that fighting in the Donbas region, where Russia has been engaged in military operations for years, is expected to resemble the battles of World War II. Meanwhile, the Kremlin has admitted that Russian forces, which did not expect to face such stiff resistance, have suffered “significant losses” in their unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
4. Twitter plans Elon Musk Q&A as Tesla CEO opens new Texas auto plant
Twitter plans to host a Q&A session with Elon Musk, the social network’s biggest shareholder and incoming board member, according to The Washington Post, citing internal company messages. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal announced the town hall session in a companywide email following a week of internal outrage that the outspoken Tesla and SpaceX CEO would hurt the company’s culture and make their jobs more difficult, the Post reported.
Musk, the world’s richest person, spoke Thursday night at a grand opening event for the electric automaker’s new $1.1 billion factory near the Austin airport in Texas. The CEO said at the event that Tesla aims to make 500,000 units of the Model Y in a single year in Austin and the company also hopes to start production of its Cybertruck there next year. Two weeks ago, Musk opened a new Tesla factory in Germany.
5. Peter Thiel calls Warren Buffett a ‘sociopathic grandpa from Omaha’
Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel said at a bitcoin conference Thursday that Warren Buffett tops an “enemies list” of people who are trying to stop the world’s biggest cryptocurrency. Thiel called the legendary investor “the sociopathic grandpa from Omaha,” referring to the Nebraska city where Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway is headquartered. Thiel also lumped in JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink as being part of the “gerontocracy” that runs global finance. The Miami tirade is Thiel’s latest and boldest public attack on the people he sees as standing in the way of the progress of bitcoin, which he’s heavily invested in.
— CNBC reporters Sarah Min, Natasha Turak, Lora Kolodny and Jennifer Elias as well as Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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