Investing.com -- The stock market is set to rebound slightly when it opens Thursday after sliding Wednesday in response to some tough love from the Federal Reserve.
Chairman Jerome Powell told his regular press conference that he and his colleagues saw no immediate need to cut interest rates, despite the high-volume fretting about the weakness of some of the components in last week’s first-quarter GDP report. The Fed’s – and the market’s – concerns may have been relieved a little by ADP’s report of a 275,000 rise in private-sector payrolls last month, something that bodes well for the official labor market report on Friday.
Dow futures were up 26 points or 0.1% by 6:45 AM ET (1045 GMT), while S&P 500 futures gained 6.1 points or 0.2% and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 futures was up 25 points or 0.3%.
Chipmaker Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) is set to come under pressure at the open after guiding for much lower sales of its 5G chips than expected by analysts when it reported after the bell on Wednesday. That’s overshadowing the disclosure that it will get up to $4.5 billion from Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) as a consequence of their recent settlement.
Among companies already reporting Thursday, health insurer Cigna (NYSE:CI) and chemicals giant Dow Dow both beat expectations, as did Royal Dutch Shell (LON:RDSa), which reported in the European morning. The morning’s biggest loser may be ticketing startup Eventbrite (NYSE:EB), which slumped 30% in after-hours trading on Wednesday after reporting a wider-than-expected loss and slower sales growth, due to problems integrating the recently acquired Ticketfly.
Elsewhere, crude oil prices fell below $63 a barrel after government data showed U.S. oil output at a new record high and a stronger-than-expected rise incrude inventories last week. Stocks are now at their highest in 19 months.
Gold futures have fallen nearly 1% on the back of Fed chair Powell’s comments Wednesday, which pushed the yields of rival haven assets such as short-dated Treasury bonds higher. Gold was at $1,272.25 a troy ounce, only $3 away from a new low for 2019.
In the currency market, the U.S. dollar index, which measures the greenback against a basket of six major currencies, was keeping its post-Fed gains, at 97.395.