What’s ahead of us is the busiest week of Q3 earnings season so far. A total of 761 companies are listed in our Zacks Earnings Calendar, which you can see here.

Among the biggest names reporting this week, we’ve got GM GM and GE Aerospace GE tomorrow, along with Lockheed Martin LMT, Boeing BA and Tesla TSLA Wednesday, and UPS UPS Thursday.

Stock Market Performance and What’s to Come

This morning’s pre-market activity is starting off slowly, with the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq all riding 6-week winning streaks. The Dow and the Nasdaq are both -70 points at this hour, with the S&P -12 points. Only the small-cap Russell 2000, which has made strides to catch up to its larger-cap brethren, has seen patches of weekly performance inconsistently of late.

The month of October has been a good one after an iffy start — and this follows an uncharacteristically strong September. Over the past month of trading, only the Nasdaq, at +1.6%, is below +2% growth. All four major indexes are up double digits year to date, led by the Nasdaq +23%.

Economic Reports This Week

Compared to next week, which brings us not only a new Personal Consumption Expenditure (PCE) report but also an earlier-than-normal print on the Employment Situation, this week will be relatively uneventful. Even last week, with Retail Sales and Housing Starts data, was more instructive to the markets than this week promises to be.

After today’s open, we’ll see Leading Economic Indicators (LEI) for September, a conglomerate of data expected to tick down to -0.3% from -0.2% posted a month ago. There will also be a new Beige Book from the Fed out Wednesday, along with New and Existing Home Sales Wednesday and Thursday.

Next week, however, with its more consequential economic prints, are ahead of the following week which promises to be even more consequential: the 2024 General Election Day is Tuesday of that week, November 5th, with the Fed meeting pushed out a day to Wednesday and Thursday of that week. That Fed meeting will decide whether a new 25 basis point (bps) interest rate cut is coming; the Election will decide how the country will ber run for the next four years.

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The Boeing Company (BA) : Free Stock Analysis Report

Lockheed Martin Corporation (LMT) : Free Stock Analysis Report

GE Aerospace (GE) : Free Stock Analysis Report

United Parcel Service, Inc. (UPS) : Free Stock Analysis Report