A trader works on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, U.S., July 30, 2025.
Jeenah Moon | Reuters
Stock futures rose Thursday following solid earnings reports from tech giants Microsoft and Meta Platforms.
S&P 500 futures jumped 0.9%, and Nasdaq 100 futures climbed 1.26%. Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average advanced 101 points, or 0.2%.
“Magnificent Seven” titans Microsoft and Meta respectively rose about 8% and 11% in premarket trading on the back of better-than-expected quarterly earnings. Software giant Microsoft said that annual revenue from its cloud computing service Azure exceeded $75 billion. Meta issued an upbeat third-quarter sales outlook, surpassing the Street’s estimates.
Fellow Mag-7 names Apple and Amazon are slated to report earnings after the bell Thursday.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on Thursday said negotiations with China are at a point where both sides ” have the makings of a deal.” Bessent did not give any details on a potential deal, however, nor did he indicate when such an agreement could be made. The U.S. and China have until Aug. 12 before the truce over aggressive tariffs runs out.
Thursday’s moves come after a mixed session on Wall Street. The Dow and S&P 500 closed lower Wednesday, while the Nasdaq eked out a small gain, after the Federal Reserve left its benchmark overnight policy rate steady at its July meeting, not all members agreed with the decision.
Fed governors Michelle Bowman and Christopher Waller dissented with the call to keep the key interest rate at a range of 4.25% to 4.50%. When asked about a potential policy change in September, Powell said that the Fed has “made no decisions.”
Ross Mayfield, investment analyst at Baird, said those moves made sense given the market’s currently “stretched” valuations. The S&P 500’s decline marked its second day of losses following a streak of six record closes in a row.
“There’s a lot of good news priced in, so I think little things on the margin can have a bigger impact when you’ve had such a run, like slightly hawkish comments in the FOMC presser,” Mayfield said to CNBC. “Sentiment has shifted back to a pretty bullish tenor, and I think the market needs to consolidate and take a breather, and it’ll grab on to whatever it needs to as an excuse.”
Traders on Thursday also looked through June’s personal consumption expenditures price index reading, the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge. Headline PCE advanced 2.6% on a 12-month basis, above the forecast from economists polled by Dow Jones that called for 2.5%. Weekly jobless claims came in at 218,000 for the week ending July 26, compared to an estimated 222,000.
