Stock futures steady after technology stock rout
Stock futures opened slightly higher Monday evening after a technology-led drawdown during the regular trading day, with a rotation away from growth names picking up steam as concerns over inflation lingered.
Contracts on the Nasdaq edged up after the index dropped more than 2% Monday afternoon. Shares of technology heavyweight Facebook (FB) steadied in late trading after shedding nearly 5% earlier, with an hours-long platform outage adding to a string of negative coverage raising further scrutiny of the social media giant.
Equity markets have faced a slew of concerns about the economic and inflationary backdrop, and regulatory and policy landscapes heading into the final quarter of the year. Wall Street’s anxiety over the debt-limit debates in Washington increased further on Monday, with Democratic and Republican lawmakers still struggling to reach an agreement to raise the federal government borrowing limit and avert what some policymakers have warned would be economy-wide disaster as soon as mid-month.
Investors are also still awaiting signals from individual companies on how they have navigated supply chain challenges, rising labor costs and other pandemic-related pressures over the past several months, with third-quarter earnings season due to begin in earnest next week.
“The growth scare probably happened, and we’ve seen a better alignment of expectations for higher inflation and lower growth. But where earnings come into play … is that we’re still going to have pockets of really high price pressure that are going to make business hard for select areas,” Francis Donald, Manulife Global chief economist, told Yahoo Finance.
“We need to be watching the earnings season not necessarily because of its broad impact – of course that matters to the market — but because we really need to be in a stock-picker’s market where those who really understand these companies are seeing who’s going to get whacked by the supply chain issues, and who’s going to benefit from the underlying fundamentals that are improving going into 2022,” she added.
Despite the plethora of headline risks to the market, a number of strategists have warned against becoming too pessimistic just yet.
“I don’t see this as the big one, the big pullback, where we’re going to go down 20% and get into bearish territory,” D.R. Barton, Jr., principal at Woodshaw Financial Group, told Yahoo Finance Live on Monday. “We’re still awash in so much money – that overcomes so much other bad news, and I think that’s the one umbrella that’s still going to keep this market propped up for a while.”
Others offered a similar take.
“We think most of the dips here are buyable. I concur with the idea that the legs that the bull case stands on, which are accommodative policy, fiscal and monetary, plus just really strong corporate operators and a really strong consumer, are enough to outweigh the headline risks of a debt ceiling standoff or policy…