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Stocks changed little Thursday morning as the market waits for Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell to speak Friday at the Jackson Hole meeting of the Kansas City Fed.
Video zoom,
Nordstrom,
Dollar Tree,
i
General dollar
the shares were moving.
He
Dow Jones industrial average
has gained 31.64 points, or 0.1%, while the
S&P 500
has fallen 0.1% and the
Nasdaq Composite
has advanced 0.1%. On Wednesday, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq hit new highs.
“Powell’s pre-speech positioning will likely dominate markets today (Powell’s speech is tomorrow) and stocks will hit new highs this week, don’t be surprised if there is any slight gain ahead of Powell’s speech tomorrow,” writes Tom Essaye, founder of Sevens Report Research.
The market will hear what Fed Chairman Jerome Powell has to say about the future of the central bank’s bond-buying program. As the economy strengthened, the Fed indicated that the process could begin soon, although the spread of the Delta variant has complicated things.
“What investors want to hear is that, in response to an impressive improvement in the economy, the Federal Reserve plans to gradually reduce its extraordinary measures because they are no longer needed, but it will do so incrementally,” says David Donabedian, head CIBC Private Wealth Investment Officer, USA.
Elsewhere, 353,000 Americans applied for unemployment benefits for the first time, slightly worse than estimates of 350,000, but not enough to move markets. “While there has been a rise this week, we don’t think there’s anything that particularly worries us,” writes Thomas Simons, an economist at Jefferies. “Backup is not big enough to mean any fundamental change in labor market flows.”
Here are six stocks that make moves in Thursday’s premarketing action:
Williams-Sonoma
Shares (WSM) rose 10% after reporting a profit of $ 3.24 per share, exceeding estimates of $ 2.60 per share, in sales of $ 1.952 billion, above expectations of $ 1.81 million.
General Dollar (DG) shares fell 7.6% after reporting a profit of $ 2.69 per share, exceeding estimates of $ 2.59 per share, in sales of $ 8.7 billion, for above expectations of $ 8.6 billion.
Dollar Tree
Shares (DLTR) fell 11% after reporting a profit of $ 1.23 per share, exceeding estimates of $ 1 per share, in sales of $ 6.3 billion, below expectations of $ 6.4 billion.
Shares of Zoom Video Communications (ZM) rose 3.5% after being upgraded to equally overweight Morgan Stanley.
Yum! Brands
(YUM) shares fell 1.4% after lowering the rating to Performance from Operperform to Oppenheimer.
Nordstrom (JWN) fell 4.8% after the department store operator downgraded to Underweight by the same weight as Morgan Stanley. Shares of Nordstrom fell 18% on Wednesday after reporting on its earnings.
Write to Jacob Sonenshine at [email protected]