Thursday’s session in the S&P 500 index futures was once again ruled by the bears, though the bulls were able to put up a good fight for most of the day.
Similar to Wednesday’s session, the overnight action began with a steady decline all the way to 5250.50, where the bulls stood their ground. From that point, the premarket session saw a decided turn as the dip was bought before GDP data was released at 8:30am EDT. The first revision of Q1’s Gross Domestic Product came in slightly above expectations (1.3% vs. 1.2% exp.), giving the edge to the bulls. The index futures soon jumped to the early premarket high of 5273.75, also coinciding with last week’s low, but came up just short and slightly sold off from there.
Once the bell rang, the opening chop found the bulls testing key resistance around the premarket high while the bears tried to initiate a further selloff. The bulls kept testing that level until April’s pending home sales came out at 10:00am EDT far below expectations (-7.7% vs. -0.4% exp.), and the bears initiated a swift selloff. Support was once again found just above the premarket low (5250.50), and the bulls staged a comeback.
With quite a bit of momentum, the bulls were able to initiate a slow and steady rally that took the index futures above the premarket high, but not quite into the green for the day. The high of 5277 was soon put in and the bears decidedly put that level in the rearview mirror. The decline continued for the rest of the afternoon and accelerated once support was broken at the premarket low during the final 15 minutes of the session.
In one last hurrah, the buy-the-dippers showed up in the last 10 minutes to bring the index futures back up from the low of 5238.25. The session concluded at 5253, marking a decline of 31 handles for the day as market participants await PCE data being released Friday morning at 8:30am EDT.
Among the top components of the index, Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) emerged as the biggest gainer. The EV maker was able to advance by $2.60 or 1.48% to close at $178.79 for the day after making a push to roll out its self-driving software in China.
That performance was over two percent better than the cash index’s decline of 0.66%.
Switching its role, the biggest loser among top components ended up being NVIDIA Corp (NASDAQ: NVDA). For the day, the chip designer declined by $43.25 or 3.77% to close at $1105.00.
