A jump in Oil crude prices pushed U.S. stock futures higher on Wednesday, with traders’ eyes on a slide in Hewlett Packard shares after its chief executive said she would leave, as well as minutes from the Federal Reserve’s latest policy meeting.
Trading volumes were thin ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday and an early close on Friday, but investors will scrutinize the minutes for Fed’s thinking on inflation for more clarity on what it might do under a new chair next year.
A final quarter-point rise under Janet Yellen next month is almost fully baked in to short-term interest rates, underlining the Fed’s continuing optimism about the economy. But the pace of rises is also slow enough not to scare stock investors who have thrived on a decade of cheap money.
“On this eve of Thanksgiving, the market is attempting to maintain an upward bias with oil prices and the macro news leading the way,” Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at First Standard Financial, wrote in a note. “We look for a fairly mixed to positive session.”
S&P 500 gained 2.5 points, or 0.1 percent, on 130,840 contracts traded while Nasdaq 100 rose 9 points, or 0.14 percent, on volume of 27,045 contracts.
All of Wall Street’s main indexes closed at record levels on Tuesday after a bounce in technology stocks, by far the best performing sector of the market this year.
One blip in that area was the 6-percent drop in Hewlett Packard Enterprise shares in premarket after Chief Executive Meg Whitman said she would leave in February six years into the job.
HP Inc, comprising the computer and printer business that Whitman carved out of the old Hewlett Packard, was also down 4.7 percent after reporting an unimpressive profit.
U.S. light crude jumped nearly 2 percent on Wednesday, hitting $58 a barrel for the first time since July 2015 as a major pipeline cut Canadian deliveries to the United States, where inventories are already said to be falling.
Oil majors Chevron and Exxon both rose half a percent and sector services provider Schlumberger gained 1 percent.
One other big gainer was U.S. tractor maker Deere & Co which rose about 5 percent after reporting upbeat quarterly earnings and issuing a strong profit forecast for the year.
The Fed’s Open Market Committee releases minutes of its October policy meeting at 18:00 GMT.
