Yahoo Finance Pre-Markets Up Ahead of Super Bowl Sunday
It’s still earnings season, and next week brings us another heavy load (albeit not of the marquee stock names — they’ve mostly all reported already), but today is Friday, and we only have results for before the opening bell. Next week also brings us a new Consumer Price Index (CPI) report for January — the closest major read on the current economy — but until then we’re fairly light on the economic front. Nevertheless, pre-market futures are in the green, the S&P 500 has touch the vaunted 5000 level for the first time in history, and the economy is clicking along.
The Dow is up +163 points at this hour, with Walt Disney DIS having zoomed ahead +11.5% yesterday on a better-than-expected quarterly report earlier this week. The Nasdaq is +103 points and the S&P 500 is +25. All major indices are up for the month, and every one aside from the small-cap Russell 2000 is in the green year-to-date. Two-year and 10-year bond yields have lately settled their inverted curve in the low-to-mid-4s. Even the weather, aside from those epic rains and floods on the West Coast, is unseasonally mild.
This morning, CPI seasonal factor revisions came out. Though there was some trepidation ahead of this print that revisions would push a few or several basis points (bps) higher — thus marring the developing narrative that core inflation was noticeably coming down — the report came in exactly unchanged at +0.3% on core. This is rather Goldilocks, actually: we also could have surprised to the downside, depicted an economy that is starting to shrink quicker than we’d been getting used to over the past year.
PepsiCo PEP reported Q4 earnings ahead of Friday’s opening bell, with earnings coming in at $1.78 per share, a +3.5% positive surprise, +6 cents per share. Go back as far as you like: Pepsi does not miss on earnings, with a trailing 4-quarter beat average of +5.5%. Revenues, however, at $27.85 billion for the global soft drinks and snacks giant — which expects to have a big Super Bowl Sunday this weekend, no doubt — came in light for the first quarter in four years, by -1.39%. For more on PEP's earnings, click here.
Aside from the Big Game, the Super Bowl brings together family and friends every year. It’s also become known as a commercial advertising mecca, with 30-second TV ads on Peacock/CBS, the parent of whom is Comcast CMCSA, are currently running $7 million per 30 seconds. Over 100 million people are planning to throw or attend a house party on Super Bowl Sunday, with another 16 million expected to pull up a barstool at a bar or restaurant, such as Buffalo Wildwings (whose current parent is the privately-traded Inspire Brands).
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