U.S. stock futures experienced little change on Tuesday night following a marginal gain by the S&P 500, marking its third consecutive positive session. Futures linked to the Dow Jones Industrial Average remained unchanged, while S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq 100 futures both rose approximately 0.1%.
GameStop saw a 7% increase during Tuesday’s extended trading hours after announcing that its board unanimously approved a plan to invest corporate cash into bitcoin, following MicroStrategy’s lead. Earlier on Tuesday, the S&P 500 posted a slight gain of 0.16%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average added 4.18 points, or 0.01%, and the Nasdaq Composite rose by 0.46%. This marked the third straight positive session for all three major averages.
Despite stocks closing slightly higher, consumer confidence data released on Tuesday indicated that U.S. consumers’ near-term outlook on income, business, and job prospects had dropped to their lowest level in 12 years. However, according to Paul Hickey, co-founder of Bespoke Investment Group, this does not necessarily indicate an impending recession. “The soft data looks terrible. If you look at the soft data, you’d say we’re in a recession right now — especially after today’s consumer confidence report — but it’s a matter of actions speaking louder than words. When you look at the hard data, we’re not seeing nearly the collapse that we’re seeing in the soft data,” he stated on CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime” on Tuesday.
Hickey further noted, “Over the last week, you’ve seen housing starts, building permits, industrial production, capacity utilization, new home sales today were all either in line with or better than expected. So that suggests that, at this point, we haven’t seen that transfer from not feeling good to actually not being good.” — news from CNBC