US open: Stocks open slightly higher ahead of State of the Union address

US stocks opened slightly firmer open on Tuesday as investors eyed Donald Trump's State of the Union address and sifted through more earnings news.

At 1515 GMT, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.52% at 25,369.66, while the S&P 500 traded 0.31% higher at 2,733.36 and the Nasdaq moved 0.58% firmer to 7,390.07.

Tech and consumer stocks helped the Dow open 138 points higher on Tuesday ahead of Donald Trump's State of the Union address later in the evening.

Oanda analyst Craig Erlam said: "The speech is going to be closely monitored by investors, keen to get an update on trade talks with China and border security, or more specifically the wall, which led to the longest ever government shutdown last month and could trigger another in just over a week.

"There have been plenty of reports that Trump is considering using emergency powers to deliver on his promise of border wall funding and this could be the platform for it, or at least a strong hint of an intention to do so."

The USD gained 0.56% on the GBP to 0.7715.

In corporate news, Google parent Alphabet was down 0.60% in early trade even after it posted a 22% jump in fourth-quarter sales to $39.3bn and a 23% increase in 2018 total revenue to $136.8bn, as operating profit came in flat at $26.3bn, slightly below expectations. In addition, capital expenditure rose to $7bn.

George Salmon, equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: "While the core business has delivered another strong performance, a higher than expected cash spend and a weak showing from the Other Bets division pushed the shares down in after-market trading.

"Higher losses from speculative projects like Waymo self-driving cars shouldn’t cause investors too much concern, after all these are early stage development projects not profit drivers.

"But another quarter of higher than expected capital expenditure is more concerning. While the core business is still growing impressively, the significant spending shows growth isn’t quite as capital-light as had been hoped."

Elsewhere, Estee Lauder surged 11.92% at the open as its second-quarter earnings and revenue beat analysts' expectations, while Viacom was up 1.75% after the release of a mixed set of first-quarter numbers.

Apple picked up 1.72% at the start of the session, propelling the tech giant back to number one on the list of largest US companies by market cap.

On the data front, IHS Markit's US services business activity index fell to 54.2 in January from the 54.4 recorded a month earlier.

New business received by service providers continued to increase at a solid rate, while price pressures eased in January, with the rate of input price inflation softening to a 22-month low.

Lastly, the ISM non-manufacturing PMI grew at its slowest pace since July.

"The NMI registered 56.7%, which is 1.3 percentage points lower than the December reading of 58%," said the ISM.

New orders registered a 57.7% reading - 5% lower month-on-month, while the employment index grew 1.2 points to 57.8% and the prices index improved 1.4% to 59.4%.