Here are 4 tips for today's trading. This will help you decide where you should invest and what to look for:
1. Market overview
1. Market overview
U.S. stock futures are rising and holding onto the big gains made over the previous two trading days.
Markets have been wildly volatile recently and stock market moves have been heavily correlated with big oil price moves.
Oil prices are up about 2% to $29.50 a barrel in early trading.
European markets are also getting a boost, rising by about 1%, while Asian markets ended with mixed results.
In the debt market, yields on U.S. Treasuries are dipping alongside many other global government bonds.
2. Apple and FBI clash
2. Apple and FBI clash
Chief Executive Tim Cook said his company opposed a demand from a U.S. judge to help the FBI break into an iPhone recovered from one of the San Bernardino shooters.
Cook said that the demand threatened the security of Apple's customers and had "implications far beyond the legal case at hand."
Judge Sheri Pym of U.S. District Court in Los Angeles said on Tuesday that Apple must provide "reasonable technical assistance" to investigators seeking to unlock data on an iPhone 5C that had been owned by Syed Rizwan Farook.
In a letter to Apple's customers, Cook said the FBI had asked the company to build "a backdoor to the iPhone." "The government is asking Apple to hack our own users and undermine decades of security advancements that protect our customers — including tens of millions of American citizens — from sophisticated hackers and cybercriminals," he said.
"We can find no precedent for an American company being forced to expose its customers to a greater risk of attack."
3. Dollar holds up
3. Dollar holds up
The dollar held steady against the other major currencies on Wednesday, as investors remained cautious ahead of a string of U.S. economic reports and the minutes of the Federal Reserve’s most recent policy meeting.
Investors were turning their attention to U.S. data on building permits, producer prices and industrial production, due later in the day, for further indications on the strength of the economy.
Market participants were also eyeing the Fed’s February policy meeting for hints on the timing of future interest rate hikes.
4. Economics
4. Economics
The federal government will post January's Producer Price Index at 8:30 am ET.
At 9:15 a.m., the Federal Reserve will post an update on industrial production and capacity utilization in January.
And then the Fed will release the minutes from its latest policy meeting at 2 p.m. Investors will parse through these documents for any clues about the Fed's plans for rate hikes in 2016.
