Stock Market Today: Futures Climb as Oil Slides Below $90 — Everything Still Waits on the 8:30 CPI
At 5:01 a.m. in New York, Dow futures were up 205 points and Brent crude was under $90 a barrel for the first time since August. The morning has a direction; the day still has a test, and it prints at 8:30.
Wall Street's pre-open tape leaned into the oil slide on Tuesday morning. Reuters reported futures tracking the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average higher as cooling oil prices emboldened investors to wade deeper into equities ahead of the inflation data — at 5:01 a.m. ET, Dow E-minis were up 205 points, or 0.39%, S&P 500 E-minis rose 12.5 points, or 0.17%, and Nasdaq 100 E-minis eased 3 points, or 0.01%, a split that says the morning belongs to the broad market more than to tech.
The fuel for it is literal. Brent crude futures fell 3.6% and slipped below $90 a barrel for the first time since August, extending a retreat Reuters' Morning Bid put at 22% since the end of October, after a 6% fall on Monday alone. Cheaper oil is doing double duty: it lifted the S&P 500 to its biggest one-day percentage gain since April on Monday, and it is pulling market-based inflation expectations down with it, with the one-year US inflation swap back below 2.0%.
None of that settles the day. The October consumer price report prints at 8:30 a.m. ET, with a Reuters survey expecting a 0.3% monthly rise after September's 0.6%, and a hotter-than-expected reading could threaten the recovery in stocks — that warning is Reuters', and the desk repeats it as a warning, not a forecast. After the print come a 1 p.m. 10-year note auction and, after the bell, earnings from the data-center firm CoreWeave, whose shares were 2.4% higher in premarket trading. New York's morning has a direction; by the close, the 8:30 number will have decided whether it kept it.
