After the bears kicked off the week, the bulls came out to contend with sellers during Wednesday’s session in the S&P 500 index futures.
Overnight, the bears were able to breach Tuesday’s low, but not by too much. For much of the premarket session, the index futures stuck around that level, too. The regular session began just above the previous day’s low, and after fending off some sellers, bulls made their way back up to unchanged.
Among the morning’s economic data, July’s US Job openings came in below expectations at 10:00am EDT at 7.67M vs. 8.09M est. Once that data was out, sellers quickly took the index futures back to the regular session open, but the buy-the-dippers were ready and bought them right back up. The choppy rally continued until the area around last week’s low, peaking at 5565. From that point, bids couldn’t quite hold up and sellers soon had the index futures back in the red.
During the lunch hour, bulls briefly fought back against the bears, but relented against the selling pressure. Afternoon trading continued largely in the same direction as the bulls and bears battled it out. In the final hour, buyers were nearly able to bring the index futures from fresh intraday lows back up to unchanged, but lost out to sellers in the final 10 minutes. The session concluded just below the day’s midpoint at 5530, losing 11.75 handles.
NVIDIA Corp. (NASDAQ: NVDA), who led the index lower Tuesday, recovered some of its losses during Wednesday’s session, which came along with a late-day report from the company that they have actually not been subpoenaed by the DOJ.
Among the top components of the index, Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) emerged as the biggest gainer. While no particular catalyst stood out, it happened that the EV maker released an Actually Smart Summon (ASS) update for select customers, signaling progress towards their full self-driving software. The EV maker was able to recover Tuesday’s losses and then some, advancing by $8.81 or 4.18% to close at $219.41 for the day.
That performance was over four percent better than the cash index’s decline of 0.20%.
On the other hand, the biggest loser ended up being Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ: AMZN). For the day, the e-commerce giant declined by $2.92 or 1.66% to close at $173.33.
