Wall Street futures are currently pointing towards a largely unchanged start to Thursday’s session, having recovered from losses incurred overnight by tracking gains seen across much of Europe at the open.
There’s mounting expectation that Mario Draghi will downgrade the ECB’s outlook for the Eurozone economy at this afternoon’s ECB press conference so the resulting expectation of Euro weakness is bolstering EUR denominated stocks.
High profile US earnings news has been largely upbeat with Ford (NYSE:F), IBM (NYSE:IBM) and Procter & Gamble (NYSE:PG) impressing yesterday and helping lift equity indices in general, although the auto maker missed profit estimates after higher than expected costs.
Earnings season continues today with a number of airlines plus Starbucks (NASDAQ:SBUX) amongst the stand outs. After Delta's (NYSE:DAL) assessment of the impact of the US government shut down on its business last week, today has the potential to see further insight as to the cost of the ongoing stand off on Capitol Hill.
There are two competing bills being debated by US lawmakers today in a bid to break the funding deadlock, although neither is expected to get the necessary majority in Senate to see matters progress. With investors becoming a little more nervous over the outlook for the US economy, equities could start reacting a little more directly to the political agenda.
Ahead of the open we’re calling the Dow down 1 at 24575 and the S&P 500 unchanged at 2639.