The latest trend in day-to-day stock market index trading looks to be the Nasdaq filling deep holes dug in the previous month while the Dow and S&P 500 basically tread water. Certainly, this is what’s happening this morning: The Dow is -3 points and the S&P 500 -2, while the Nasdaq is up a modest +17 points at this hour. The Nasdaq is up +5.6% over the past five trading days.
We’ve got a big day ahead with both economic prints and Q4 earnings reports. After today’s opening bell, we look for both
Markit PMI
and
ISM Manufacturing
reports for January. Both are expected to cool just a tad from December. We also get
Job Openings
and, perhaps more interestingly these days,
Job Quits
for December. Also
Construction Spending
for December will be released. After today’s closing bell, we get a smorgasbord of Q4 data:
Alphabet
GOOGL
,
Starbucks
SBUX
,
General Motors
GM
,
PayPal
PYPL
and
Gilead
GILD
, among others, report earnings.
Ahead of the open,
Exxon Mobil
XOM
beat Q4 estimates on both top and bottom lines: earnings of $2.05 per share outpaced the $1.96 in the Zacks consensus, with $84.97 billion in revenues, above the estimated $82.88 billion and more than +80% year over year. Its $48 billion in cash-flow operations is its biggest in a decade. With oil prices currently at their highest in seven years, it was expected the Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) company would post a healthy quarter. This marks Exxon’s sixth-straight earnings beat.
Atlanta-based homebuilder
PulteGroup
PHM
also posted Q4 earnings this morning, with $2.51 per share beating the Zacks consensus $2.29 and the $1.49 per share reported a year ago. Revenues of $4.36 billion were +4.68% over estimates and far ahead of the $2.19 billion from Q4 2021. Shares of the Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) stock had been down -7.8% year to date, and are now +3.6% in today’s pre-market.
Considering the bleak conditions in the market for much of January (good riddance, and “Kalo Mina” for February, to all our Greek friends), we appear to be in pretty good shape from this vantage point. This is what makes the plethora of data expected later today so important: will it, in aggregate, support this sketchy narrative so far of a bearish… dare we say “bottom?,” or will it point to risk areas not yet fully absorbed by the recent paring in equities markets?
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