All three major U.S. stock indexes ended lower last week.
U.S. stock futures were little changed late Monday, following another brutal week for tech stocks.
Dow Jones Industrial Average futures (YM00) were recently up about 68 points, or 0.1%. S&P 500 futures (ES00) were up 0.1% while Nasdaq-100 futures (NQ00) were about flat.
Gold (GC00) and silver (SI00) futures fell on Monday, while bitcoin remained below the $70,000 level. Crude oil futures (CL.1) rose more than 1% as investors remain anxious over possible U.S. military action against Iran.
Markets closed mostly higher Friday, though all three major U.S. stock indexes ended the week lower as fears of potential future AI disruptions continued to weigh heavily on tech stocks. The Dow DJIA fell 1.2%, its worst week since November, while the S&P 500 SPX slid 1.4% and the Nasdaq COMP slumped 2.1%, extending its losing streak to five weeks – its longest since 2002. U.S. markets were closed Monday for the Presidents Day holiday.
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That came after a tame inflation report Friday that showed prices rose less than expected in January, a potentially encouraging sign for Fed officials considering future interest-rate cuts. The report raised hopes that the U.S. economy may yet pull out a rare soft landing – that is, cutting inflation to the Fed’s 2% annual target while avoiding a recession in doing so.
Read more: U.S. economy suddenly seems on track for fabled soft landing: 2% inflation without a recession
The coming week will see the release Wednesday of the Fed’s minutes from their last meeting, and another key inflation reading – the core personal-consumption expenditures index – on Friday.
Meanwhile, fourth-quarter earnings season is wrapping up. And while more companies have been beating earnings expectations, that hasn’t done much to boost the stock market, as worries about both artificial-intelligence spending and AI’s potentially disruptive effects on certain industries – especially software – have sharply shifted investors’ sentiment.
“It is software eating itself,” Stephen Innes, managing partner at SPI Asset Management, said in a weekend note, noting that the software and services sector of the S&P 500 is down 27% since late October. He said many software companies became dramatically overvalued in recent years, “on the assumption that margins would stay stratospheric forever.”
However, “If AI compresses those margins even modestly, the equity math changes violently. A few turns off the multiple at elevated starting valuations is not a trim. It is an amputation,” Innes said.
This week should be quieter on the earnings front, as investors await earnings from AI bellwether Nvidia (NVDA) the following week. The coming week will see earnings reports from Walmart (WMT), Door Dash (DASH), Wayfair (W), Palo Alto Networks (PANW) and Live Nation Entertainment (LYV), among others.
-Mike Murphy
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