Dow Futures Dip as Wall Street Seeks Rates Guidance From the Fed

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Stock futures dipped Wednesday after strong earnings reports from

Walmart

and

Home Depot

lifted the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Tuesday to its fifth straight day of gains.

While more earnings reports from retailers such as

Target

(ticker: TGT) and

Lowe’s

(LOW) are scheduled for Wednesday, the focus for investors will be on minutes from the latest Federal Reserve meeting.

Contracts linked to the

Dow Jones Industrial Average
declined 86 points, or 0.3%, to 34,032,

S&P 500
futures were down 0.4% and

Nasdaq
futures fell 0.6%. 

Asian stocks rose Wednesday while European shares declined after inflation in the U.K. soared 10.1% in July to the highest level since the 1980s.

The Dow and S&P 500 posted modest gains Tuesday after second-quarter earnings reports from Walmart (WMT) and

Home Depot

(HD) topped Wall Street forecasts. The S&P 500 has risen 18% from its June lows, largely on the back of rising corporate profits.

Investors on Wednesday will be keyed in on minutes from the Federal Reserve’s last meeting at the end of July. At that meeting, the Federal Open Market Committee boosted interest rates by 0.75 a percentage point for the second straight month. The central bank has raised raised four times this year in an effort to slow the U.S. economy.

Recent signs of cooling inflation at both the consumer and wholesale levels have led investors to bet on a less aggressive Federal Reserve.

“Investors will be looking for any clues in the minutes report that suggest the Fed may slow its pace of rate hikes now that the inflation data are starting to decelerate,” said Geetu Sharma, founder and investment manager of Minneapolis-based AlphasFuture LLC. “The next FOMC meeting is not for another five weeks, which is a long way away, and it’s too early to tell if one decelerating inflation report will cool the Fed’s tightening efforts. We need more inflation data.”

Edward Moya, senior market analyst at Oanda, said the Fed minutes “will confirm the Fed’s dependency with the next round of inflation data, which should suggest that another massive 75-basis point rate hike is very much still on the table.”

The minutes will be released at 2 p.m. Eastern time. Other data expected Wednesday include U.S. retail sales for July.

Here are some stocks on the move Wednesday:

Manchester United

(MANU) was up 4.1% after Elon Musk tweeted he was buying the U.K. soccer club but then said in a subsequent tweet that it was only a joke.

Shares of Musk’s electric-vehicle company,

Tesla

(TSLA), were down 0.4% in premarket trading.

Bed Bath & Beyond

(BBBY) was up 29% in premarket trading. The stock has risen nearly 350% over the past three weeks amid a frenzy of meme stock buying.

Write to Joe Woelfel at [email protected]