By Peter Nurse
Investing.com - U.S. stocks are seen opening largely unchanged Friday, with investors cautiously awaiting the release of the highly-anticipated May jobless report.
At 7 AM ET (1200 GMT), the Dow Futures contract was down 25 points, or 0.1%, S&P 500 Futures traded 1 points, or 0.1%, higher, and Nasdaq 100 Futures climbed 12 points, or 0.1%.
Wall Street has seen lacklustre trading throughout most of this holiday-shortened week, with eyes on the release of the May nonfarm payrolls data, at 8:30 AM ET (1230 GMT).
“The soft U.S. jobs report of just a 266k increase in April set the tone for the month of May. This allowed markets to look through Federal Reserve references to tapering, safe in the view that the central bank would not be hurried into a decision,” said analysts at ING, in a note. “This week’s release of the May jobs report also stands to set the tone for trading in June.”
Despite the week’s muted trading, the major indices remain near record highs, helped by strong signs of economic recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic while the Federal Reserve retains very accommodative monetary policies.
The latest unemployment data released Thursday provided the latest signs of this recovery, with weekly jobless claims falling below 400,000 for the first time since the early days of the pandemic and May’s private job growth rising at its fastest rate in nearly a year.
In the corporate sector, AMC Entertainment (NYSE:AMC) will remain in focus, with the meme stock seen over 6% lower premarket, the day after the movie theater chain raised just short of $600 million in additional funding via a stock sale.
The likes of Crowdstrike (NASDAQ:CRWD), Lululemon Athletica (NASDAQ:LULU), DocuSign (NASDAQ:DOCU) and Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO) are also likely to be in focus after they all released quarterly earnings after the close Thursday.
Crude oil prices pushed higher Friday, continuing the recent rally to multi-year highs, amid optimism that global demand for fuel was recovering while U.S. supplies slipped.
By 7 AM ET, U.S. crude was up 0.4% at $69.11 a barrel, climbing to the highest level since October 2018. Brent was up 0.3% at $71.50, after climbing to the highest since May 2019. Both contracts have climbed about $5 each in the past two weeks.
U.S. crude stockpiles fell more than expected on Thursday in another bullish sign for the market, with data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration showing a draw of just over 5 million barrels last week, bigger than the expected 2.4-million-barrel draw.
Later Friday, traders will focus on the latest weekly update from Baker Hughes of the number of oil rigs, while the CFTC will release its weekly commitments of traders report.