Pre-market futures are flat-to-lower this morning, after a mostly down Friday — buoyed on the Dow mostly by the positive trade on UnitedHealthcare UNH, in which Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.B) has taken a big stake. The Dow is up again: +30 points, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq are down -2 points and -16 points, respectively.
This is the week of the earnings season cycle where major retailers begin to release their results. This week alone, we’ll hear from Walmart WMT, Costco COST, Target TGT, The TJX Companies TJX and Home Depot HD on quarterly earnings. It’s the final leg of earnings season, in a general sense, to hear from the retailers who tend to stagger their earnings quarters to take advantage of holiday sales into January.
August Homebuilder Confidence comes out later this morning, after the opening bell. Expectations are for another tick-up to 34 from the prior month’s 33, which in turn was up from 32 — the lightest post-Covid print for homebuilding. We expect this all comes down to interest rates, and this revolves around the Fed funds rate, which has still not come down at all in 2025. Once cuts begin at the Federal Reserve, we might expect to at last see some relief in housing.
After the close this afternoon, we expect earnings results from two key growing tech firms: Palo Alto Networks PANW, which provides enterprise security, and Fabrinet FN, which is a tech assembly firm. Palo Alto is expected to gain +17.3% on earnings and +14.2% on revenues in its fiscal Q4. Fabrinet looks to bring +9.5% earnings growth and +17.2% on the top line.
We’re not chock-full of economic data for this week, but we’ve got a fair share. Housing Starts and Building Permits will come out Tuesday, followed by the minutes of the most recent Fed meeting on Wednesday. Thursday is the biggest day of data for the week: Weekly Jobless Claims, Philly Fed, flash Services & Manufacturing from S&P and ISM, Existing Homes Sales and Leading Economic Indicators (LEI) all hit the tape that day.
Importantly, Fed Chair Jerome Powell is expected to deliver a speech at the Jackson Hole Economic Symposium this Friday, where the theme is “Labor Markets in Transition: Demographics, Productivity, and Macroeconomic Policy.” This will be the first update on the Fed Chair’s outlook on the economy since the most recent Fed meeting (of which we’ll see the minutes a couple days prior), and as such may be insightful for future rate-cut prognostication.
