U.S. stock index futures were little changed on Tuesday as investors awaited producer price inflation data and a speech by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell later in the day for cues on the monetary policy path in the world's largest economy.
Market Snapshot
At 7:50 a.m. ET, Dow e-minis were up 31 points, or 0.08%, S&P 500 e-minis were up 1 points, or 0.02%, and Nasdaq 100 e-minis were down 8 points, or 0.04%.
Pre-Market Movers
Meme Stocks (GameStop, AMC Entertainment, Koss, Blackberry ) - GameStop was up 145% in premarket trading after closing 74% higher on Monday. Investor Keith Gill, who goes by the handle “Roaring Kitty,” on Sunday made his first post on his X account since 2021. Gill played a role in the meteoric rise of GameStop with bullish commentary on the video game retailer during peak meme-mania of 2020 and 2021. He followed up the post with more posts Monday, hyping up GameStop investors.
AMC Entertainment, another popular meme stock, surged 78% on Monday following Gill’s posts. AMC was up another 115% in premarket trading.
Koss rose 33%; Blackberry rose 25%.
Alibaba (BABA) - U.S.-listed shares of Alibaba fell 5.4% after the Chinese e-commerce company reported fiscal fourth-quarter earnings below Wall Street estimates.
Sea (SE) - Sea Ltd. reported first-quarter earnings that exceeded analysts’ estimates, a sign that the Southeast Asia e-commerce leader is managing to navigate fierce competition from the likes of ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok. The shares jumped 5.7% in premarket trading.
Sony (SONY) - Sony was rising 3.2% in U.S. premarket trading after fiscal fourth-quarter earnings rose 34% from a year earlier and revenue jumped 14%. The gains were driven by strong operating profits from its from the Japanese company’s games and movie businesses.
Paysafe (PSFE) - Paysafe jumped 13% after the online payments-solutions company reported first-quarter earnings and revenue that beat analysts’ estimates.
On Holding (ONON) - Shares of On Holding gained 9.6% after the Swiss sneaker seller posted first-quarter earnings that more than doubled from a year earlier and revenue jumped 21%. The company said direct-to-consumer net sales in the first quarter rose 39% and 48.7% on a constant currency basis.
Home Depot (HD) - Home Depot, the world’s largest home-improvement retailer, was up 0.5% in premarket trading after first-quarter earnings of $3.63 a share beat analysts’ estimates but revenue of $36.4 billion missed forecasts. Same-store sales in the period fell 2.8% versus expectations for a decline of 2.2%.
Walmart (WMT) - Walmart gained 0.2%. The Wall Street Journal reported the world’s largest retailer is cutting hundreds of corporate jobs and asking most remote workers to move to offices. The Journal’s report cited people familiar with the matter.
Market News
China's Alibaba Beats Quarterly Revenue Estimates, Profit Drops
Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. reported a 6.6% rise in revenue after its main e-commerce and cloud businesses managed only modest growth.
Revenue for the three months ended March rose to 221.9 billion yuan ($30.7 billion), compared with analysts’ estimates for 219.8 billion yuan. Net income dived a worse-than-expected 86% after accounting for losses from publicly traded holdings.
OpenAI Launches Faster and Cheaper AI Model With GPT-4o
OpenAI is launching a faster and cheaper version of the artificial intelligence model that underpins its chatbot, ChatGPT, as the startup works to hold on to its lead in an increasingly crowded market.
During a livestreamed event on Monday, OpenAI debuted GPT-4o. It’s an updated version of its GPT-4 model, which is now more than a year old. The new large language model, trained on vast amounts of data from the internet, will be better at handling text, audio and images in real-time. The updates will be available in the coming weeks.
Asked a question verbally, the system can reply with an audio response in milliseconds, the company said, allowing for a more fluid conversation. In a demonstration of the model, OpenAI researchers and Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati held a conversation with the new ChatGPT using just their voices, showing that the tool could talk back. During the presentation, the chatbot also appeared to translate speech from one language to another almost instantaneously, and at one point sang part of a story upon request.
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