Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq futures rise as hopes for US-China trade talks banish Big Tech gloom
US stock futures rose on Friday as a possible thawing in US-China trade tensions boosted spirits after earnings from Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) shed light on the likely cost of tariffs.
Dow Jones Industrial Average futures (YM=F) moved up roughly 0.5%, coming off an eighth straight day of gains for the blue-chip index. S&P 500 futures (ES=F) added 0.4%, while contracts on the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 (NQ=F) moved up 0.2%.
Beijing is evaluating US officials’ recent overtures on trade talks to assess how serious the Trump administration is about shifting its stance, China’s commerce ministry said on Friday. It said the “door is open” if the US agrees to pull back on reciprocal tariffs, paving the way to starting formal negotiations.
Read more: The latest on Trump’s tariffs
S&P 500 and Nasdaq futures jumped after the comments, which helped ease worries about the risk of economic slowdown from President Trump’s trade offensive. The gauges reversed course after dropping in the wake of Apple and Amazon results, which stoked those tariff concerns.
Apple warned of a $900 million tariff headwind this quarter and cut back on share buybacks, sending its stock lower in pre-market trading despite its quarterly earnings beat. Meanwhile, Amazon also lost ground after earnings topped estimates thanks to disappointing guidance that pointed to tariff and trade factors.
Markets are now counting down to the release of the monthly US jobs report due at 8:30 a.m. ET, looking for clues to whether trade war uncertainty hit hiring in April. The nonfarm-payrolls reading is the first since the “Liberation Day” tariffs, and economists are expecting the addition of 135,000 jobs, compared with 228,000 in March.
But while impacts from Trump’s tariffs have begun to show up in economic data, they aren’t expected to have fully spilled over into this labor market reading yet.
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