Traders work on the New York Stock Exchange floor on Sept. 9, 2024.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images
U.S. stock futures were little changed Tuesday night ahead of the August consumer inflation report due Wednesday morning.
Dow Jones Industrial Average futures fell 6 points, hovering near the flatline. S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq 100 futures both dipped less than 0.1%.
In after-hours action, shares of GameStop dropped 10%. The video game retailer amended an open market sale agreement filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, allowing it to sell up to 20 million additional shares of its Class A common stock.
During Tuesday’s regular trading, the S&P 500 advanced nearly 0.5% and the Nasdaq Composite climbed 0.8%, aided by a jump in Nvidia shares. It marked a back-to-back gain for the broad market benchmark and the tech-heavy index. The 30-stock Dow was the outlier, falling 0.2% as a decline in JPMorgan shares weighed on the blue-chip index.
Traders are anticipating a key economic report Wednesday morning: August’s consumer price index. Economists polled by Dow Jones expect the headline CPI to have risen 0.2% from the previous month and 2.6% from a year earlier.
The CPI report and Thursday’s producer price index could help determine the size of a widely expected rate cut at the end of the Federal Reserve’s two-day meeting on Sept. 18. Fed funds futures trading suggests a 69% chance of a 25-basis-point rate cut and a 31% likelihood of a 50-basis-point reduction, according to CME’s FedWatch Tool.
“I think what we’re going to see next week is a Fed that gives us a 25-basis-point rate cut because to give us a 50-basis-point cut will set off alarm bells and would also be an admission of guilt,” said Kristina Hooper, chief global market strategist at Invesco, on CNBC’s “Closing Bell.”
“I don’t think that the Fed keeping us at very restrictive monetary policy levels for a long time creates damage that is irreparable, but I do believe every day that we have rates at these levels the odds of a recession increase,” Hooper added.
She noted that central bankers may have to indicate next week through their dot plot — a chart of Fed policymakers’ projections for rates — that future reductions are on deck sooner rather than later.
