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US stock futures (ES=F, NQ=F, YM=F) are ticking higher Monday as investors gear up for a packed week of Big Tech earnings and key economic data.
Yahoo Finance Senior Reporter Josh Schafer breaks down what to watch, from Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) earnings results to the GDP and April jobs report.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Morning Brief here.
US stock futures up fractionally this morning ahead of a big week for investors spending big tech earnings, the April jobs report and more. Here to break down the biggest items on the agenda for investors, we got our own Josh Shafer. So let's just kind of line up what's on the docket here Josh.
Yeah, Brad. So like you said, it is really a massive week both from a corporate perspective and an economic perspective. I'll start with the corporate side. I mean, we're looking at I think about 180 S&P 500 companies expect expected to report this week. You guys mentioned, you have Apple, you have meta, you have Microsoft, you have Amazon, those coming later in the week. You also have Coca-Cola, some consumer facing brands, Eli Lilly, also a very large waiting in the S&P 500 will be reporting this week. And then guys, you shift over to that economic data side. There's a lot this week. Uh so you're going to start tomorrow with Jolts, uh job openings, sorry, I should say jobless claims will come later in the week, but Wednesday, I think it's going to be an interesting one with that first quarter GDP release. Right now consensus expecting GDP only increased 0.1% in the first quarter, which is rather interesting because again, the first quarter is largely before the tariffs came, right? The first quarter would have ended at the end of March. So it doesn't really include a lot of the tariff back and forth necessarily, but still maybe not a strong GDP report there. I think that's going to be an interesting one to watch. Then, of course, you have the April jobs report on Friday. Largely, I think economists have argued that that jobs report will not show a lot of impacts from tariffs quite yet. And they're not expecting to see a large slowdown in the labor report that we get on Friday. So that sort of puts the risk, I would argue, perhaps to the downside if you get an uptick in unemployment or a weak jobs number. Of course, we're sort of looking, I think at this point for signs, further signs of weakness in the economy seems to be the theme overall.
It also sounds like from what you're saying, Josh, that the impact of tariffs could become more clear through the earnings than through the economic data for now, just because of when the data is falling. Talk to me then about the market impact that some of these earnings could have if we do start to get clues about the economic impact, consumer backdrop from these earnings.
Yeah, I mean, you think about just the four big companies you're going to hear from that have really sort of led the selloff, right? When we think about this selloff and sort of what's been the action, it's been a lot of tech companies, right? Apple has sold off significantly. Meta, maybe a little bit less so. Microsoft also been under pressure and so has Amazon. So I think the question will be, can these companies say anything that really sort of comforts investors? We looked last week, Meg 7 had their best week since 2023. Big rally, and then you take a look and you zoom out year to date, these stocks are all still down. They're all still very far off 52 week highs. Alphabet had okay earnings last week. Market seemed to generally like it. The stock closed up 1% on Friday. So it's not like you saw a massive rally out of that, and I don't really know if that's what drove your rally on Friday either. So you haven't had a full sentiment shift in terms of how people are sort of looking at these companies. It doesn't seem like, what you've had is just a lot of move off the bottom. And so at some point, how do you get an incremental move higher? It would probably be a, these companies tell you something more comfortable than you thought, and B, you don't get any policy whiplash this week. We kind of avoided that last week, which was surprising. I feel like that was the first time basically since the start of April that it didn't feel as noisy. And if there was noise, it was maybe beneficial. So you sort of combine those things and it still feels like a little bit of a cloudy picture to some extent, I would say, but we'll see.
From some of the reports and analysis that you're sifting through, Josh, just on that note of feelings versus fundamentals, how are we seeing that kind of prevail as a lot of firms are and are really trying to just parse through where the real earnings have come in versus where some of the feelings that are knocking around the market are standing.
I mean, the feelings are still bad, right? We know that Michigan Consumer Sentiment was out of Friday. It's one of the worst readings on record. If you go back to 1978, it's just incredibly low. You're going to get consumer confidence tomorrow. No one expects that to be good either, right? You sort of shift that to a story I did over the weekend. I was asking economists, when are we going to see that in the data? So to your point about the data that's coming out this week, largely economists think you're not going to see it shift to the hard data until maybe May, June. Once you start to get readings from May or June, so it actually probably be June or July. So you're sort of waiting to just see how bad it is, essentially, right? We know that the data is probably going to come in weaker at some point. The question is how weak. And I think again, that brings me back to this week, that GDP print. I think is going to be interesting because that's kind of where the economy was left off before the large impact of tariffs. So if we were already slowing at a significant pace, or close to slowing, I should say. 0.1% is positive. But if we were close to slowing, it makes you wonder sort of where things head from here, I think to some extent.
And all of that cloudiness is what leads to me spending my weekend looking at trucking data in California instead of any of the broader headlines that we've got.
There's less shipments coming into the LA ports, Maddie. People are talking about it.
They're panicking.
People are talking about it.
They're panicking. All right, Josh, thank you so much. Appreciate it as always.