Stock market today: Wall Street quietly tips toward gains ahead of Nvidia earnings, inflation data

Wall Street quietly tipped toward gains in premarket trading Monday at the start of a week featuring another full slate of corporate earnings and the government’s latest reading on inflation.

Futures for the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average were both up less than 0.1% before the bell.

The biggest earnings report this week will come Wednesday from recent tech darling Nvidia, whose shares are up 161% so far this year even after a month-long swoon this summer.

Nvidia has been a big beneficiary of Wall Street’s mania around artificial intelligence, becoming one of the stock market’s most massive companies, with a total value topping $3 trillion. Real money has backed the rise, with tech companies furiously buying Nvidia’s chips to train their AI models.

When Nvidia reports its latest quarterly results, analysts will be looking for its revenue to have surged to $28.65 billion in the spring, up 112% from a year earlier. Critics say such stellar growth has set off too much euphoria among investors and raised concerns that Nvidia and other Big Tech stocks have grown too expensive.

Other companies reporting this week include Kohl’s, Chewy, Salesforce and Dollar General.

On Friday, the government serves up its latest inflation data, which comes within the Commerce Department’s consumer spending report. Federal Reserve officials, most notably Chair Jerome Powell, strongly hinted last week that it was time for the central bank to start cutting its benchmark lending rate with inflation seemingly under control.

On Tuesday, the Conference Board releases its consumer confidence index, a closely watched report because consumer spending accounts for about 70% of economic activity in the U.S.

Elsewhere, in Europe at midday, France’s CAC 40 rose 0.2%, while Germany’s DAX lost 0.1%. Britain’s FTSE 100 added 0.5%.

Oil prices rose after Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah traded heavy fire on Sunday, triggering potential supply worries.

In energy trading, benchmark U.S. crude rose $2.08, or 2.8%, to $76.91 a barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, rose $2.13 to $80.28 a barrel.

The Bank of Japan’s governor had hinted Friday that more hikes in Japanese interest rates may be coming if inflation stays on course to sustainably hit its 2% target. This was after the BOJ raised its key interest rate in late July to about 0.25% from a range of zero to about 0.1%, aiming to curb the yen’s slide against the dollar. He also mentioned the bank was closely monitoring recent gyrations in stock prices and currencies.

The dollar slipped to 144.13 yen in Monday trading.

Japan’s benchmark Nikkei 225 slipped 0.7% and ended at 38,110.22 in response to the stronger yen.

The People’s Bank of China maintained its one-year medium-term lending facility (MLF) rate at 2.30% on Monday, after cutting it by 20 basis points in July. This was delayed from its usual mid-month schedule as part of the central bank’s plan to overhaul its policy rate system and reduce the role of the MLF rate in favor of using short-term rates to guide the markets.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index added 1.1% to 17,798.73 while the Shanghai Composite index rose less than 0.1% to 2,855.52.

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.8% to 8,084.50. South Korea’s Kospi closed 0.1% lower at 2,698.01.

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury was steady at 3.81% up a tick from Friday’s 3.80%. The two-year Treasury yield, which moves more closely with expectations for action by the Fed, was unchanged at 3.91%.

On Friday, the S&P 500 rose 1.1% to 5,634.61 and pulled within 0.6% of its all-time high set last month. The benchmark index has clawed back virtually all of its losses from a brief but scary summertime swoon.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1.1% to 41,175.08, crossing the 41,000 level for the first time since it set its own record in July, while the Nasdaq composite jumped 1.5% to 17,877.79.

The big gains to close the week came after the Fed’s Powell said the time had come to lower the main interest rate from a two-decade high.

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