Pending Home Sales: Tomorrow's Headliners
NEW YORK (
) -- Pending home sales data for December will be the key report for traders to watch during Tuesday's trading session.
The National Association of Realtors is expected to say that its index of sales of previously occupied homes rose 1.1% in December, retracing some of the previous month's decline. The report will be released at 10 a.m. EST.
In November, the
pending home sales
index plummeted 16% to a reading of 96. Although the decline was far greater than expected, the index was still up by 15.5% compared to November 2008, when the index was at 83.1.
A new month also brings the latest auto sales data. The first batch of reports for 2010 is expected to show improvements from a year ago but still be off of December's sales pace. Auto researcher
Edmunds.com
said new vehicle sales in January, including fleet sales, are expected to be around 701,000 units, a 7.1% increase from January 2009 but a 31.7% drop from December.
Perhaps more notable is
Edmunds.com's
prediction that
Toyota
(TM) - Get Report
will see its market share plummet to 14.7%, the lowest level in nearly four years, because of the automaker's recall of up to 9 million cars worldwide, including 2.3 million in the United States and Canada. The recall is related to faulty gas pedals that
is working to fix this week.
Among other automakers,
Ford
(F) - Get Report
sold 126,000 units in January, up 33.4% from a year ago but down 30.4% from the previous month.
General Motors
likely sold 140,000 units in January, up 8.8% from last year but down 32.7% from December, according to
Edmunds.com
.
On the earnings front, reports from
UPS
(UPS) - Get Report
,
BP
(BP) - Get Report
,
Marathon Oil
(MRO) - Get Report
,
Dow Chemical
(DOW) - Get Report
and
Archer-Daniel Midland
(ADM) - Get Report
, among many others, are due for release before the start of trading Tuesday.
After the closing bell,
MetLife
(MET) - Get Report
,
Aflac
(AFL) - Get Report
,
News Corp.
(NWS) - Get Report
and
Tesoro
(TSO)
are all on tap to post quarterly results.
-- Written by Robert Holmes in Boston
.
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