US pre-open: Future point to early gains
Wall Street futures had stocks opening higher ahead of the bell on Friday as another busy week for corporate earnings gets set to draw to a close.
As of 1205 BST, Dow Jones futures were up 0.38%, while S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 futures had the indices opening 0.79% and 1.14% stronger, respectively.
The Dow closed 332.04 points higher on Thursday following the Federal Reserve Bank's decision to raise interest rates by 0.75 basis points and the release of US GDP figures.
Earnings were in focus again on Friday, with Amazon and Apple moving higher in pre-market trading after reporting strong quarterly sales growth in cloud computing and iPhones, respectively.
In terms of Friday's earnings slate, Chevron, Procter & Gamble, Exxon Mobil, and Colgate-Palmolive will all report before the bell.
AvaTrade's Naeem Aslam said: "This week has been mainly about the Fed, the US GDP data and US corporate earnings. Investors had a lot of information to digest and overall sentiment has been positive. Speaking from a monetary policy perspective, we are in a scenario where bad news is good news as this means that the Fed will not take aggressive measures towards its monetary policy.
"For instance, yesterday's GDP number for the US economy were as dire they could have been but if you look at the stock market, we saw a decent rally. All the major US stock indices are on track to post gains for the week. As for the corporate earnings, the message is that companies are cutting their head counts or being immensely cautious with their hiring approach and this means that the labour market which has been doing well so far could begin to show weakness soon."
On the macro font, June's PCE price index, as well as personal income and spending figures, will be published at 1330 BST, while a final reading of the University of Michigan's July consumer sentiment index will follow at 1500 BST.
Reporting by Iain Gilbert at Sharecast.com