United States stock futures were modestly higher on Thursday night (Friday AEDT), offering a tentative rebound after Wall Street logged its sharpest decline in more than a month overnight.
By 10:35 am AEDT (11:35 pm GMT), futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, S&P 500, and Nasdaq 100 were each up 0.2%.
The advance followed a broad sell-off on Thursday, after all three major U.S. benchmarks retreated as investors scaled back expectations for a Federal Reserve rate cut and continued to pull money out of high-risk technology names.
The Dow shed 1.7%, the S&P 500 fell 1.7%, and the Nasdaq slid 2.3% as technology and high-growth names led declines.
Mega-cap tech stocks were hit hard. Nvidia dropped 3.6% and Broadcom slipped 4.3%, while Alphabet, Google’s parent company, lost 2.8%.
The pullback came as investors grew increasingly sceptical about the sustainability of the artificial intelligence trade.
Sentiment was further pressured by uncertainty surrounding the Federal Reserve’s upcoming policy meeting. Traders now assign nearly a 50.7% probability that the Fed will cut its benchmark overnight rate by 25 basis points at its December gathering, according to the CME Group FedWatch Tool.
The end of the longest government shutdown in U.S. history - which concluded on Wednesday after stretching on for more than six weeks - had been expected to restore clarity by allowing the release of key economic data.
Instead, it has added new uncertainty. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt warned that some economic data scheduled for release during the shutdown might never be published, prompting investors to question whether the absence of those indicators will make the Fed more reluctant to ease policy.
For the week so far, the Dow remains up 1%, the S&P 500 has gained 0.1%, while the Nasdaq is down 0.6%.
