By Medha Singh
(Reuters) – Futures tracking the Dow and S&P 500 dipped on Tuesday as investors looked to the big U.S. banks to kick off the quarterly corporate earnings season, with focus also on commentary from Johnson & Johnson after it paused its COVID-19 vaccine trials.
Shares of the drugmaker, whose quarterly earnings report is due later in the day, were down 1.5% in premarket trading as it said it had paused the clinical trials due to an unexplained illness in a study participant, delaying high profile efforts to contain the global pandemic.
A rally in technology heavyweights and hopes of more U.S. fiscal stimulus led Wall Street’s main indexes higher on Monday, putting the benchmark S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq within striking distance of their record highs hit in September.
Apple Inc rose 2% ahead of an event later in the day where it is expected to unveil its newest iPhones.
Shares of Amazon.com Inc, which have already surged 86% this year, added another 1.4% as it began 48 hours of promotions as part of “Prime Day” in an early start to the holiday shopping season.
Bank stocks, on the other hand, have widely underperformed the broader market in 2020 and analysts expect the sector’s earnings to take years to make a full recovery as interest rates remain near record lows.
Earnings reports from JPMorgan Chase & Co and Citigroup Inc, due shortly, will set the tone for the quarterly performance of big U.S. lenders scheduled to report this week.
Overall, analysts expect third-quarter earnings for S&P 500 firms to slide 20.7% from a year earlier, smaller than a 31% tumble in the prior quarter.
At 6:06 a.m. ET, Dow e-minis were down 130 points, or 0.45%, S&P 500 e-minis were down 5.25 points, or 0.15%, and Nasdaq 100 e-minis were up 94.25 points, or 0.78%.
Walt Disney Co jumped 4.5% as it restructured its media and entertainment businesses to accelerate growth of Disney+ and other streaming services.
(Reporting by Medha Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta)
