Yesterday, market participants took a powder from the latest leg of the bull rally, finishing in the red across major indexes: the Dow -0.19%, S&P 500 -0.55% and Nasdaq -0.95% as of the closing bell. This morning, pre-market futures are buoyed back up: +0.09% on the Dow, +0.13% on the S&P 500 and +0.20% on the Nasdaq. The small-cap Russell 2000 is up +0.06% at this hour.
Yesterday, after the close, Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) Micron MU released fiscal Q4 earnings results, demonstrating the power of the AI trade. Earnings of $3.03 per share easily surpassed the $2.86 in the Zacks consensus, and more than doubled the $1.18 per share reported in the year-ago quarter. This amounted to nearly a +6% positive surprise.
Revenues of $11.32 billion in the quarter outperformed estimates by +0.47% — +46% year over year as AI chips become the dominant purveyor of economic growth over the past quarter and into the future. Shares are down -1% in today’s pre-market, however, after jumping +2% on the news late yesterday. MU shares are +95% year to date, so consider this a “sell the news” event.
After the opening bell, August New Home Sales are expected to have fetched 650K seasonally adjusted, annualized units — down from the prior month’s 652K, and generally in-line with where we’ve seen new home sales rates thus far year to date. For the July report, the West led the way, up +11.7%, while the Northeast was flat, the South was down -3.5% and the Midwest dropped -6.6%.
The median price per new home sale in July came down a smidge to $403.8K, while the number of unsold homes stayed high at 499K. This amounted to more than 9 months’ inventory at this rate. We’ll see later this morning if we’re moving in a notable, perhaps better, direction. Existing Home Sales are scheduled for release Thursday morning.
We’ve packed most of the important market data into the tail end of this week, with earnings reports for KB Home KBH and StitchFix SFIX after the bell today and Costco COST tomorrow. Thursday also brings us Weekly Jobless Claims, Trade Balance, Retail/Wholesale levels, Durable Goods, the aforementioned Existing Home Sales and a bevy of Fed member speeches.
Friday brings us Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) for August — the Fed’s preferred metric on inflation — and a final print on Consumer Sentiment. As we see the weekly stock market trade go sideways a bit thus far, we’ll have a lot more grist for the mill by the end of this week.
