US futures tip lower with another inflation test ahead

US stocks were poised for further losses on Thursday as investors braced for another key inflation report after a surprise uptick in consumer prices undermined bets on interest-rate cuts.

Futures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) and S&P 500 (^GSPC) slipped around 0.3%, coming off a rout that saw the gauges drop about 1%. Contracts tied to the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 (^NDX) were down about 0.2%.

Meanwhile, the 10-year Treasury yield (^TNX) traded at around 4.55%, steadying after surging to touch its highest level since November on Wednesday.

Stocks pulled back and bond yields soared after a hotter-than-expected March CPI report prompted investors to reassess expectations for Federal Reserve policy. The market is now pricing in just two rate cuts in 2024, to come later in the year than foreseen. A handful of analysts believe no cuts or even a hike may be possible, depending on how economic data shape up.

Focus is now on the Producer Price Index reading due at 8:30 a.m. ET to find out whether wholesale inflation will also prove another sticking point in the Fed’s mission to cool price pressures.

Another headwind, rising oil prices, returned to the fore amid growing worries about a potential attack on Israel by Iran forces. Crude futures slipped but stayed near six-month highs, with West Texas Intermediate (CL=F) trading a tad below $86 per barrel, while Brent (BZ=F) stayed above $90.

A rate decision from the European Central Bank due Thursday morning could also help set the tone, after the US inflation shock eroded hopes for a June cut.

Against that backdrop, hopes are that first-quarter corporate results can provide momentum to stocks, given limited signs that high borrowing costs are slowing earnings. As reports trickle in, investors are bracing for quarterly updates from some of America’s biggest banks, including JPMorgan (JPM), to usher in the season in earnest on Friday.

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Thu, April 11, 2024 at 11:57 AM GMT+1

Amazon shareholder letter read-through to Nvidia

The last thing Nvidia (NVDA) bulls watching their favorite stock enter correction territory this week want to see is Amazon (AMZN) CEO Andy Jassy’s annual shareholder letter that dropped this morning.

I found Jassy’s comments on Amazon building its own AI chips very fascinating.

“To date, virtually all the leading foundation models have been trained on Nvidia chips, and we continue to offer the broadest collection of Nvidia instances of any provider. That said, supply has been scarce and cost remains an issue as customers scale their models and applications. Customers have asked us to push the envelope on price-performance for AI chips, just as we have with Graviton for generalized CPU chips. As a result, we’ve built custom AI training chips (named Trainium) and inference chips (named Inferentia). In 2023, we announced second versions of our Trainium and Inferentia chips, which are both meaningfully more price-performant than their first versions and other alternatives. This past fall, leading foundation model-maker, Anthropic, announced it would use Trainium and Inferentia to build, train, and deploy its future foundation models. We already have several customers using our AI chips, including Anthropic, Airbnb, Hugging Face, Qualtrics, Ricoh, and Snap.

Jassy’s super long read can be found here.
Thu, April 11, 2024 at 11:00 AM GMT+1

The day after the CPI sell-off

Yesterday was one of those shock moments in markets.

We have all lived through worse sessions for stocks and seen more eye-opening economic reports, so it wasn’t shocking in that context. It was just that investors were caught off guard by the inflationary CPI report, and they sold stocks because everyone else was selling and saying to sell.

Some calm has returned to markets this morning, but futures are still under pressure and nervousness is in the air ahead of the PPI report.

A new survey of US investors out of JP Morgan also isn’t bolstering sentiment on the Street. You can see below that investor appetite to own stocks has fallen sharply as rate cut hopes have been dialed back.

Less of an appetite to own stocks here. (JP Morgan)