US STOCKS-S&P, Nasdaq futures advance on tech boost, earnings cheer

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Futures: Dow down 0.02%, S&P up 0.11%, Nasdaq up 0.47%

April 24 (Reuters) – S&P 500 and Nasdaq futures gained on Wednesday on a growth stocks boost as investors lauded upbeat earnings from megacap Tesla and awaited economic data due later this week for clues on the U.S. central bank’s interest-rate trajectory.

Tesla led gains across megacap stocks with a 9.9% jump in premarket trading after the electric-vehicle maker said it would introduce new, affordable models.

Other EV stocks also rose, with Lucid Group, Nikola and U.S.-listed shares of Nio up between 1.2% and 3.7%.

Shares of other growth stocks also advanced, with Amazon.com , Microsoft and Nvidia up between 0.3% and 1.6%.

Meanwhile, Meta Platforms and Snap gained 1.7% and 2.1%, respectively, after the U.S. Senate passed a bill late on Tuesday that would ban TikTok in the United States if its owner, the Chinese tech firm ByteDance, failed to divest the popular short video app.

Meta, Microsoft and Alphabet are scheduled to report their quarterly results later this week.

Planemaker Boeing, defense conglomerate General Dynamics and drugmaker Biogen are among others slated to report quarterly earnings before the bell.

U.S. equities seem to have recovered from last week’s slump, when markets were roiled by the tensions in the Middle East and re-evaluated their rate-cut expectations from the Federal Reserve.

As the corporate earnings season gathers steam, adjusted blended earnings are estimated to grow by 6% for the quarter on a year-on-year basis, according to LSEG data.

“The large volume of company results this week gives investors a lot more to focus on than purely macro events, which is leading to the extra levels of market vitality,” Sophie Lund-Yates, lead equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said in a note.

Traders await the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) index reading for March, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge, due on Friday, as market participants try to ascertain if the central bank will cut interest rates this year.

Money markets are now pricing in around 41 basis points of cuts this year, down from about 150 bps seen at the beginning of the year, according to LSEG data.

On the docket for the day is the durable goods data for March, due at 8:30 a.m. ET.

At 5:30 a.m. ET, Dow e-minis were down 7 points, or 0.02%, S&P 500 e-minis were up 5.75 points, or 0.11%, and Nasdaq 100 e-minis were up 83.5 points, or 0.47%.

Among other stocks, Visa added 2.8% in premarket trading after the payments processing giant’s second-quarter results sailed past Wall Street estimates, as consumers shrugged off worries of a slowing economy.

Texas Instruments climbed 7.3% after the chipmaker forecast second-quarter revenue above analysts’ estimates, signaling an uptick in demand for its analog semiconductors.

Mirroring the gains, chip stocks such as Arm Holdings , Micron Technology and Advanced Micro Devices also rose between 1.4% and 3.6%. (Reporting by Shristi Achar A in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai)

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