The mixed bag of earnings releases continues for Wednesday’s session, and the S&P 500 index futures continue to establish a range in the middle of last week’s bounds.
Bulls started the overnight session strong, helped along by a positive reaction to earnings from Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOG, GOOGL) and Meta Platforms, Inc. (NASDAQ: META) Tuesday evening. While the bulls were able to break through the recent double-top early on, the bears soon formed resistance around the 5886 area, which would last for the remainder of the premarket and intraday sessions.
Amongst the day’s economic data, October’s ADP Employment data was released at 8:15am EDT, way above expectations at 233K vs. 113K exp. nonfarm jobs added. At 8:30am EDT, Q3’s GDP came in below expectations at 2.8% vs. 3.1% exp. After this news, the bears started off the regular session in the red, and pressed further. Support was soon found above Tuesday’s low, however, and the bulls came back for a quick rebound.
September’s Pending Home Sales also came in way above expectations at 7.4% vs. 0.7% exp. at 10:00am EDT, and the bulls continued their push into green territory. Unfortunately, resistance in the 5886 area came back into play over the lunch hour and the bears erased all gains by late afternoon and pressed lower.
As the close neared, the bulls tried to put up a fight near Tuesday’s low once again, and were only able to recover about 5 handles of losses during the final few minutes of trading. The session concluded in the lower half of the day’s range at 5852, losing 19 handles.
Market participants still have more top component earnings to look forward to on Thursday, including Amazon.com, Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AMZN) being released at approximately 4:01pm EDT and Apple Inc.’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) being released at approximately 4:30pm EDT. On top of earnings, Thursday’s news will also include PCE index data, set to be released at 8:30am EDT.
Among top components of the index, Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: GOOGL) emerged as the biggest gainer. After releasing their Q3 earnings Tuesday evening, which included top and bottom-line beats, several analysts upgraded their price targets. The search giant was able to hold onto around half of its overnight gains, advancing by $4.78 or 2.82% to close at $174.46 for Wednesday’s session.
That performance was over three percent better than the cash index’s decline of 0.30%.
Conversely, the biggest loser ended up being Eli Lilly And Co (NYSE: LLY). The company released their Q3 earnings report during premarket trading Wednesday, and in short, they missed on the top and bottom-line and lowered their FY forecast. While the healthcare company was able to recover some losses by the end of the day, it still swooned by $57.22 or 6.33% to close at $846.83.
