Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on September 9, 2024.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images
U.S. stock futures were little changed Tuesday evening ahead of the August consumer inflation report due Wednesday morning.
Dow Jones Industrial Average Futures It is down 6 points, and is hovering near the flat line. S&P 500 Futures and Nasdaq 100 Futures Both fell by less than 0.1%.
In after-hours procedures, shares Game Stop Shares of the video game company fell 10%. The video game company amended its open market sale agreement filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, allowing it to sell up to 20 million additional shares of its Class A common stock.
During regular trading on Tuesday, Standard & Poor's 500 Up about 0.5% and Nasdaq Composite It rose 0.8%, helped by a jump in Nvidia Stocks. The broad market index and the technology-based index posted consecutive gains. Dow JPMorgan Chase was the outlier, falling 0.2% as a decline in JPMorgan Chase shares weighed on the blue-chip index.
Traders are awaiting a key economic report on Wednesday morning: the consumer price index for August. Economists polled by Dow Jones expect the core CPI to rise 0.2% from the previous month and 2.6% from a year earlier.
Thursday’s CPI and PPI reports could help gauge the size of a widely expected rate cut at the end of the Fed’s two-day meeting on Sept. 18. Fed funds futures are trading at a 69% chance of a 25 basis point rate cut and a 31% chance of a 50 basis point cut, according to CME’s FedWatch tool.
“I think what we’re going to see next week is the Fed giving us a 25 basis point rate cut, because giving us a 50 basis point rate cut would be a wake-up call and would also be an admission of guilt,” Kristina Hooper, chief global market strategist at Invesco, said on CNBC’s “Closing Bell.”
“I don't think that keeping the Fed at very restrictive monetary policy levels for an extended period of time is doing irreparable damage, but I do think that every day that we have interest rates at these levels increases the likelihood of a recession,” Hooper added.
She noted that central bankers may have to signal next week through their dot plot — a chart of Fed policymakers' expectations for interest rates — that future cuts will be on the table sooner rather than later.
