The American stock markets are set to open higher on Thursday on the first trading day of the new year. Tech stocks led in premarket trading, including semiconductor and crypto-related companies.
Futures on the leading S&P 500 index were 0.8 percent in the green around lunchtime. The Nasdaq appears to start 1.0 percent higher.
Economic news comes on Thursday from the weekly support applications and from a purchasing managers index for American industry. There are also figures on construction spending and oil inventories during the trading day on Wall Street.
Oil was in the green on Thursday. A February West Texas Intermediate future rose 1.4 percent to $72.74, while a March Brent future rose 1.4 percent to $75.68.
European natural gas prices rose to the highest level in fourteen months on expectations of colder winter weather. In addition, Russia stopped the supply of natural gas to Eastern Europe via Ukraine, following the expiration of a transit agreement between the two countries that have been at war with each other for years.
The euro/dollar traded at 1.0331. When the American stock markets closed on Tuesday, the reading was 1.0362. Danske Bank sees a chance of a downward correction for the dollar in the short term if American growth figures disappoint.
Company news
Tesla is expected to announce sales figures and analysts expect that it will not have sold just enough cars to exceed the number of cars sold in 2023. The share was 1.5 percent higher before the market closed.
MicroStrategy rose more than 5 percent after declines in previous trading days, thanks to the value of cryptocurrency bitcoin rising well above $96,000. CoinBase also increased in value by 4 percent before the market closed.
Semiconductor companies Nvidia, Broadcom and AMD rose before the bell, after their shares ended the year with declines. Palantir Technology gained 1.3 percent pre-market. The stock rose 340 percent last year, thanks to the AI hype.
Final positions
The American stock markets ended lower on Tuesday. The S&P 500 lost 0.4 percent to 5,881.63 points on New Year’s Eve and the Nasdaq closed down 0.9 percent to 19,310.79 points. The Dow Jones index fell 0.1 percent to 42,544.22 points.
Door: ABM Financial News.
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