A trader works on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange on May 12, 2025.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Stock futures rose Friday after the S&P 500 posted a four-day rally on the back of U.S. and China’s temporary tariff cuts and encouraging inflation reports.
Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average added 111 points, or 0.3%. S&P 500 futures gained 0.2% along with Nasdaq-100 futures.
Stocks have made a strong comeback since U.S. and Chinese officials earlier this week agreed on a 90-day truce in their tariff measures, which eased investors’ fears of escalating global trade tensions and rising risk to the economy.
Week to date, the S&P 500 is up 4.5%, and the Dow has gained 2.6%. The Nasdaq Composite has jumped more than 6% this week. Both the S&P 500 and Dow closed higher on Thursday, while the Nasdaq fell slightly.
Thursday “was just a continuation of what we’ve seen over the past few days, this sigh of relief in response to the U.S. bringing down tariff rates on China,” said Callie Cox, chief market strategist at Ritholtz Wealth Management. “There’s still this big question about what tariffs could mean for the economy, and right now investors are looking for that center of gravity and assessing the economic damage. But at the moment, it seems like moves are driving markets in the absence of any signals coming out of economic data.”
Stocks got a boost Thursday from a soft inflation report, showing that wholesale prices declined 0.5% in April from the prior month. The result follows the release of April’s consumer price index earlier this week, which grew at a 12-month rate of 2.3%, its lowest since February 2021.
Even as the temporary agreement between the U.S. and China has lifted sentiment this week, some major U.S. companies are issuing warnings about rising costs and a murky macroeconomic outlook. Walmart said on Thursday that it will likely have to raise prices on some items in late May due to tariffs.
“That concern didn’t make its way into markets that was overshadowed by this tech-led sigh of relief from the tariff news that we got Monday, but there is an undercurrent of anxiety,” Cox said of the Walmart warning. “We’re getting these little signs of tariff impact that haven’t really overwhelmed investors’ attention yet, but could could be indicative of cracks forming underneath the surface.”
Friday could see an uptick in volatility on Wall Street due to a large amount of options contracts that are set to expire. Goldman Sachs estimated that more than $2.8 trillion of notional options exposure will expire on Friday, the biggest such number on record for a May trading day.
On the economic front, traders will keep an eye out Friday for housing starts data and the University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey.
