Market Snapshot
Asia: Japan +0.4% to 19560. Hong Kong -0.4% to 24375. China +1% to 3617. India -0.7% to 28261.
Europe: London +0.1%. Paris +0.2%. Frankfurt +0.6%.
Futures: Dow +0.4%. S&P +0.3%. Nasdaq +0.3%. Crude -0.4% to $45.34. Gold +0.2% to $1171.20.
Ten-year Treasury Yield +3 bps to 1.98%
Economic News
None Scheduled
CMCM, DRI, KBH, TIF
Markets
U.S. stocks are set to post solid weekly gains, with futures indicating a rebound from yesterday’s slip. For the week, all benchmarks were poised for advances, coming after a choppy week when the main benchmarks were thrown between gains and losses in anticipation of the Fed statement.
The Obama administration is expected to issue long-awaited regulations today setting new standards for hydraulic fracturing in the oil and natural gas industries. The final rules fail to appease either side, with environmentalists arguing for strong protections and oil industry leaders who insist well-tailored state rules are better than one-size-fits-all federal mandates.
Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras agreed to speed up his economic reform plans at last night’s crisis talks in Brussels. Also at the summit, EU leaders decided to keep sanctions on Russia in place until the end of this year at the earliest, linking them to the “complete implementation” of a Ukraine ceasefire deal.
Stocks
The FAA has granted Amazon (AMZN) approval to test a delivery drone outdoors, allowing test flights over private, rural land in Washington state. The company must keep flights below 400 feet and the drone in sight. Amazon’s “Prime Air” program looks like it now has the opportunity to get off the ground, after being jeopardized in February under the FAA’s commercial drone rules.
BNY Mellon (BK) has announced it will pay $714M to settle federal and state allegations of foreign exchange rate fraud. BNY Mellon admitted that it had promised to give customers best interbank market price of the day on forex transactions, but instead gave them the worst. There’s still no word of anybody being fired, but an earlier report suggested that it would be part of the deal.
Darden Restaurants gains in premarket action after the owner of Olive Garden, among other restaurant chains, reported earnings that beat estimates.
GM CEO Mary Barra will be deposed in October by lawyers representing consumers suing the company over the defective ignition switches included on millions of recalled vehicles. The lawyers leading the class action personal injury and death lawsuits against the automaker say the depositions of GM executives will begin May 6, including many of the 15 former lawyers and executives fired by Barra last year, and will continue for five months.
Despite headwinds including macroeconomic trends, adverse weather and the West Coast port slowdown, Home Depot (HD) is maintaining a strong outlook for the remainder of 2015.
Tapping into a gray area of the net neutrality debate, HBO (TWX), Showtime (CBS) and Sony (SNE) are in talks with broadband providers about having their Web TV services treated as “managed services,” giving them a separate lane that would ensure their content gets special treatment. While net neutrality states that all traffic on the Internet should be treated equal, the FCC maintains that cable and phone companies can offer “managed services” – digital phone and video-on-demand, for example – that run on a dedicated slice of bandwidth in the cable pipe which is separate from the portion reserved for public Internet access.
Nike (NKE) says its quarterly profit jumped 16% on higher apparel and shoe demand, while its “futures orders” increased 11%. Net income rose to $791M from $682M a year earlier. During its earnings call, Nike said it expects fiscal 2016 revenue to fall to the high single-digit range, below its previous expectations of above the mid-teens, and sees full-year earnings coming in below its long-term targets.
Shares of Tiffany & Co. (TIF) slip ahead of the bell after the jeweler reported a small drop in sales.