Stock Futures Signal Gains for Wall Street
Stock index futures were indicating a higher open for Wall Street Thursday, with blue chips and tech stocks alike appearing to be set for early gains.
S&P 500
futures were up 4 points to 1411 and were 2 points above fair value. Nasdaq 100 futures were adding 9 points at 2005 and were 3 points ahead of fair value.
Last time out, the major indices rallied strongly for most of the session thanks to encouraging inflation data, until the final hour, when profit-taking deflated most of those gains.
At the end of the day, the
Dow Jones Industrial Average
rose 66 points to 12,898, and the S&P 500 climbed 6 points to 1409. The
Nasdaq Composite
edged up 2 points to 2497.
As the new day began, traders were greeted with word that
CBS
(CBS) - Get Report
would buy Internet media company
CNET
(CNET) - Get Report
for $1.8 billion. That news lifted CNET by more than 40%, but CBS was slipping 3%.
General Electric
(GE) - Get Report
, a component of the Dow, was another early gainer, tacking on 0.7% following a report in
The Wall Street Journal
that the company is considering selling or parting ways with its appliances division. The unit could fetch $5 billion to $8 billion, the report said.
Meanwhile, investors were mulling reports that billionaire investor Carl Icahn -- who was said earlier this week to have begun acquiring large amounts of
Yahoo!
(YHOO)
stock -- has lined up 10 possible directors to nominate as replacements for the Internet company's board. Yahoo! shares were up 1.7% in the premarket.
Icahn's interest came after
Microsoft
(MSFT) - Get Report
walked away from its merger offer for Yahoo!.
Elsewhere, Britain-based bank
Barclays
(BCS) - Get Report
lost 3.3% after reporting a $1.94 billion writedown and saying its first-quarter profit had withered from last year.
As for economic data, the New York
Federal Reserve
is set to release its state's manufacturing data at 8:30 a.m EDT. At the same time, initial jobless claims are due from the Labor Department, and the U.S. Treasury's net foreign purchases data should come at 9 a.m. EDT.
Among commodities, crude oil was up 66 cents to $124.88 a barrel, and gold futures were off 20 cents at $866.30. The U.S. dollar slipped against both the euro and the yen.
Treasury prices were falling. The 10-year note dipped 3/32 in price to yield 3.93%, and the 30-year bond gave up 8/32 in price, yielding 4.63%.
Markets abroad were mixed. In Asia, Tokyo's Nikkei 225 added 0.9% overnight, but the Hang Seng Index in Hong Kong slipped 0.1%. As for European bourses, London's FTSE 100 climbed 0.2%. Germany's Xetra Dax and the Paris Cac, however, lost 0.3% and 0.1%, respectively.