Stock Market Today: Futures Waver on CPI Eve — Dow Up, Nasdaq Down in a Mixed Monday Start

Monday's opening question is which index is telling the truth. US stock futures were mixed ahead of the open, TipRanks reported in its 2:55 a.m. Eastern snapshot: Nasdaq 100 futures down 0.79 percent, S&P 500 futures down 0.07 percent, and Dow Jones futures up 0.30 percent. A second pre-open read put the same split in levels — S&P 500 contracts hovering near the flat line at 7,403.50, Nasdaq 100 futures down 0.2 percent to 27,033.75, and Dow futures up 0.4 percent to 51,605. Reuters' Morning Bid called it a fragile calm after AI whiplash: Asian shares rebounding and US futures edging higher after last week's chaotic unwinding of the AI trade, with Wall Street having managed to end Friday on a higher note.

The week's calendar explains the hesitation. The October consumer price index lands Tuesday, with the producer price index following Friday, and both will be read for clues on Federal Reserve policy: traders currently assign roughly an 80 percent probability to another rate increase at the Fed's December 8-9 meeting, according to CME FedWatch, after the central bank held its benchmark at 3.75 to 4.00 percent in October, having delivered its first hike in three years in September. Earnings run alongside the data — CoreWeave on Tuesday evening, Cisco and Applied Materials on Thursday — amid open concerns about the sustainability of the AI trade, and a governance probe at Nvidia hangs over the sector's biggest name.

So the city's trading week opens the way the data says it opens: split. The Dow's industrial weight is bid, the Nasdaq's growth weight is offered, and neither side has to wait long for evidence — Tuesday's 8:30 a.m. CPI print is less than a day of trading away. This desk reports the open and the close from the verified numbers when they print, and the CPI when it lands; nothing in this file predicts any of them.