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Markets Await Economic and Earnings Data

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With banks and schools open once again to start a new work week, pre-market futures are still see-sawing toward a new settling point. After a down day yesterday, we see the Dow +30 points, the S&P 500 +3 points and the Nasdaq +33. Buying back shares across industries appears to be the way to go; we’re still at sale prices on the indexes: for the month, the Dow is -1%, the S&P is -2.4% and the Nasdaq is -4.1% from this time a month ago.

We are still getting off to a slow start with new actionable information this week: no economic reports are expected ahead of the opening bell, and only a few dozen earnings reports are on tap today. Once the regular trading session is underway today, we’ll see August Job Openings released. These are expected to be 10.9 million, in line with what we saw a month ago and consistent with other reads on current levels of unemployment.

Tomorrow is when the real action begins for Q3 earnings. Although we’ve already heard from industry leaders like FedEx ((FDX - Free Report) , Nike ((NKE - Free Report) and Costco ((COST - Free Report) in weeks past, Wednesday morning we hear from JPMorgan ((JPM - Free Report) and Delta Air Lines ((DAL - Free Report) , both carrying Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) ratings into their Q3 reports. From there, we’ll move on to other big Wall Street banks for the remainder of the week and beyond.

JPMorgan has been the model citizen of the Big Banks over the past several quarters. The company has just two negative earnings surprises over the past five years, and has beaten each quarter in the past four by an average of 33%. Earnings of $3.00 per share on $29.45 billion, which would demonstrate year-over-year growth of 2.7% and 1.1%, respectively. It’s last earnings surprise was by a solid +22%.

Delta, on the other hand, is looking for its second-straight earnings beat after four consecutive quarterly misses. None missed by all that much; the trailing four-quarter average is a miss of less than -0.1%. Year-over-year growth on earnings is expected to be +105%, +173% on the revenue side. This speaks to the deep hole this airline — and all major airlines — were in during the low levels of pandemic conditions a year ago.

Also this morning, new documents are being released by the FDA regarding granting Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) to Moderna’s ((MRNA - Free Report) booster vaccine for Covid-19. This follows Pfizer’s ((PFE - Free Report) EUA of its similarly derived Covid vaccine, as the Pfizer drug was released to market first. Data reportedly supports getting a booster dose after six months. The company also discussed half-dose measures for the booster shots.

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