5 things to know before the stock market opens on Thursday 22 April

Below are the most important news, trends and analyzes that investors need to start their trading day:

Futures of U.S. stocks fell slightly on Thursday after Wall Street recovered from a two-session losing streak. The Dow Jones industrial average gained 316 points on Wednesday, up 0.9%. The S&P 500 was up 0.9%. The Nasdaq jumped 1.2%. The Dow and S&P 500 were shyly split from their record highs on Friday. The Nasdaq was at 1% of the record closing in February. Ten-year Treasury yields, which rose to 14-month highs in March and hampered technology stocks, fell in early Thursday and remained below 1.6%.

The Department of Labor is scheduled to report its weekly look at unemployment claims at 8:30 a.m. ET, one hour before the opening bell. Economists expect 603,000 new applications for unemployment benefits last week. The initial claims of 576,000 the previous week were easily the best number since the start of the Covid pandemic. It was the first reading below 600,000 out of the 256,000 reported for the week ending March 14, 2020.

Southwest Airlines said Thursday that leisure travel bookings continue to rise and forecast uneven cash flow “or better” for June. The Dallas-based airline posted first-quarter net profit of $ 116 million, compared to a loss of $ 94 million a year ago. His first-quarter profit was the result of more than $ 1 billion in federal aid that offset his labor costs. Revenue of $ 2.1 billion fell about 52% from the previous year. Shares rose 1.5% in the pre-market.

American Airlines posted a net loss of $ 1.25 billion, its fifth consecutive quarterly loss. The carrier, like its big rivals Delta and United, has been forced to do without much of the revenue from commercial and international travel, which they relied on for a long time. U.S. revenue reached just over $ 4 billion, a drop of nearly 53% from the more than $ 8.5 billion it posted a year ago. Shares jumped 2.3%.

Credit Suisse reported a net loss of $ 275 million in the first quarter on Thursday after warning of heavy losses earlier this month in the fall of US hedge fund Archegos Capital. Shares of the Swiss bank listed on Wall Street fell by about 7% in premarket trading. However, this loss was narrower than expected. Had it not been for Archegos, Credit Suisse CEO Thomas Gottstein told CNBC on Thursday that the first quarter was “one of our best quarters in the bank’s history”. “Definitely the best quarter in the last ten years,” he added, considering Archegos ’losses to be unacceptable.

President Joe Biden is committed to cutting greenhouse gas emissions in the United States by half by 2030, the White House announced before hosting a global climate summit on Thursday and Friday. This goal roughly doubles America’s previous commitment under the 2015 Paris climate agreement. It will be attended by the 40 Biden world leaders invited to the virtual meeting, including those from China and India. The summit is an opportunity for the United States to rejoin global climate efforts after the Trump administration abandoned the Paris agreement.

India on Thursday reported a record number of daily covid cases as the country’s second wave of coronavirus shows no signs of slowing down. There were 314,835 new cases in a 24-hour period. This surpassed the highest increase in the world in a single day, maintained by the United States in January. There is also growing concern about the double mutation of a Covid variant that was discovered in India, which could make the virus more contagious. India is the second in America in the most accumulated infections among countries, with about 16 million, about half the total of the United States and about 2 million more than the number 3 in Brazil. However, unlike India and Brazil, which are on the rise, new daily cases in the US have been on a downward trend.

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