Stock futures hugged the flat line Monday evening as overnight trading kicked off ahead of the final session of the month and quarter.
The S&P 500 and Dow were on track to post gains of less than 1% for the month of June. The Nasdaq Composite outperformed amid a broad tech rally, with the index on track to post a monthly advance of more than 4%.
During Monday’s session, the Dow’s more than 2.3% gain was powered in large part by Boeing (BA), which surged 14% during the regular session after the Federal Aviation Administration began its long-awaited test flights for the 737 Max. The aircraft manufacturer pared some gains in late trading, dipping more than 1%.
Elsewhere, shares of Lululemon (LULU) rose in late trading after announcing it would be acquiring the home fitness startup Mirror, putting it in competition with indoor cycling company Peloton (PTON). Shares of Peloton fell in late trading, though the stock had more than doubled for the year to date through Monday’s close as Wall Street bet on the resilience of the workout-from-home phenomenon in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
Shares of Wells Fargo (WFC) also fell in late trading after the company announced plans to slash its dividend, following the Federal Reserve’s announced restrictions on bank payouts last week in its stress test results. Peer big banks including Bank of America (BAC), Citigroup (C), Morgan Stanley (MS) and Goldman Sachs (GS) left their third-quarter dividends unchanged, however, and shares of these banks traded slightly higher overnight.
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell is set to deliver testimony before the House Financial Services Committee alongside U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Tuesday. In prepared remarks released Monday afternoon, Powell noted that despite some more upbeat developments in recent economic reports, “output and employment remain far below their pre-pandemic levels.”
“The path forward for the economy is extraordinarily uncertain and will depend in large part on our success in containing the virus,” he added in the statement. “A full recovery is unlikely until people are confident that it is safe to reengage in a broad range of activities.”
Incrementally more positive developments in the pandemic’s spread across new hot spots also helped buoy stocks during Monday’s session. Texas reported a 2.9% one-day increase in new coronavirus cases for the lowest rise in a week, according to Bloomberg data, though intensive-care units in the Houston area remained strained. Florida’s cases rose 3.7%, or 1.8 percentage points below the average increase over the past seven days. California’s new-case rate, at 2.8%, also trailed its average over the past week.
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Here were the main moves at the start of the overnight session for U.S. equity futures, as of 6:07 p.m. ET:
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S&P 500 futures (ES=F): 3,047.25, down 0.5 points or 0.02%
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Dow futures (YM=F): 25,482.00, down 15 points, or 0.06%
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Nasdaq futures (NQ=F): 9,981.25, down 7.5 points, or 0.08%
Traders wearing masks work, on the first day of in person trading since the closure during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, U.S., May 26, 2020. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid
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