Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on July 24, 2024 in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images
Stock futures were mixed Thursday as investors looked ahead to the release of key data and tried to recover after a tough session for Wall Street.
S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq 100 futures dropped 0.15%. Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average edged down 18 points.
Ford Motor shares tumbled 13% after the company’s second-quarter earnings came in much lower than analysts expected. Chipotle, meanwhile, added 3% after topping earnings and revenue expectations as it saw higher traffic at its restaurants. American Airlines sank 7% after cutting its guidance.
Wednesday’s trading session saw intense declines for the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite, driven by disappointing quarterly reports from Alphabet and Tesla. This led other heavyweight tech stocks and artificial intelligence darlings like Nvidia and Microsoft to fall in sympathy. Both the broad-market index and the tech-heavy benchmark posted their worst session since 2022, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average shed roughly 504 points to end the day.
Investors have been viewing the recent declines as a sign of an overdue correction in an overbought market, which is now seeing a rotation away from megacap tech into small-cap stocks and more cyclical areas of the market.
“We do have a lot of uncertainty right now … Also, I would call it an air of skepticism in terms of what [artificial intelligence] can deliver in terms of profitability and productivity, at least in the near term. And the market right now is a very much in a ‘show me’ state and wants to see this happen or see proof on a more accelerated timeframe,” Yung-Yu Ma, chief investment officer for BMO Wealth Management, said on CNBC’s “Closing Bell.”
There are healthy areas of the market, such as cruise lines and U.S. infrastructure, Ma said, however. He added that megacap technology names will still “struggle for a while” until they can regain their footing and have more proof come forward about their AI-related results.
Although some major tech names missed expectations this week, an overall positive earnings season so far is propping up investor enthusiasm. More than 25% of companies in the S&P 500 have reported their second-quarter earnings, according to FactSet data.
Jobless claims data, and preliminary second-quarter GDP data will be released before market open.