Earnings Data Deluge

Pre-market futures continue their ascent to start a new week of trading, despite starting slowly with new data, either for Q3 earnings or economic reports. The Dow is +246 points at this hour, the S&P +59, the Nasdaq +341 and the small-cap Russell 2000 +24 points. From mid-day lows last Wednesday, the Dow is +1.92%, the S&P +2.60%, Nasdaq +3.79% and +4.27% on the Russell.

Economic reports this week were going to be back-weighted overall anyhow, with Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) for September out Friday. But with the government shutdown now in Day 27, we’ll be going without PCE and several other news items released by departments within the government: Durable Goods Orders, Trade Balance in Goods, Retail/Wholesale Inventories, Weekly Jobless Claims and GDP (a product of overall PCE data).

We will see Case-Shiller home prices for August and October Consumer Confidence Tuesday, as well as Pending Home Sales and the latest FOMC decision, which is nearly iron-clad to deliver another 25 basis-point (bps) cut, to a Fed funds rate of 3.75-4.00% — its first sub-4% read in three years. Mild CPI numbers Friday morning was likely the final straw.

U.S./China trade talks continue — clearly nothing has been said to bum out the markets at this stage — but are still fairly nebulous. Huntington Bankshares HBAN is reportedly buying regional Cadence Bank CADE (Tupelo, MS) for $7.4 billion or roughly $39 per share. And this week brings us the biggest Q3 earnings week so far, by market cap: Alphabet GOOGL, Meta Platforms META, Microsoft MSFT, Apple AAPL and Amazon AMZN.

Keurig Dr Pepper Meets, Gains +10%

Ahead of today’s open, Keurig Dr Pepper KDP is out with its Q3 earnings report — only meeting on its bottom line, 54 cents per share, but +4% on its top line, which reached $4.31 billion in quarterly revenues. Also, the company raised $3 billion in preferred stock from KKR and Apollo (more on this during the KDP conference call), which points toward something more ambitious, perhaps, than the Global Coffee pod manufacturing project also announced today. Shares are up +10% in early trading, but still negative for the year.

More Earnings After the Close

This afternoon, we see Q3 earnings season pick up, with numbers due from Nucor NUE, Best Bath & Beyond BBBY, NXP Semiconductors NXPI, Whirlpool WHR and F5 FFIV. We’re officially seeing reports from nearly all spectra of industry in a week that will being us nearly 1000 earnings reports. Only NXPI carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) into its earnings week; NUE and WHR are Zacks Rank #4 (Sell), with BBBY and FFIV Zacks Rank #3 (Hold).

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