(Reuters) – Futures tied to Wall Street’s main indexes were subdued on Wednesday after the S&P 500 rose close to its all-time high in the previous session on growing expectations that the Federal Reserve would cut interest rates as early as March.
Premarket trading volumes were low, with most participants away on year-end holidays and due to a lack of any strong cues, except the weekly jobless claims data expected on Thursday.
An eight-week rally in the main indexes went into overdrive two weeks ago after the Fed signaled the end of its rate hike cycle and opened the door to potential rate cuts in 2024.
“Equities look set to end the year in buoyant form as the disinflation theme continues to fuel the rally in global risk assets,” said Raffi Boyadjian, lead investment analyst at XM.
Markets extended a rally on Tuesday in light trading, a day after the Christmas holiday, with the benchmark index near its highest close since January 2022. It is now on track to post its biggest quarterly gain in three years.
Closing above the 4,796.56 level would confirm the S&P 500 has been in a bull market since touching the bear market nadir, the closing low reached in October 2022.
“Once the Santa high fades, the hangover will hit,” said Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote Bank.
At 6:01 a.m. ET, Dow e-minis remained unchanged, S&P 500 e-minis were down 1 point, or 0.02%, and Nasdaq 100 e-minis were down 0.75 points.
Among individual movers, shares of Bit Digital were up 9.3% in premarket trading as the U.S.-based bitcoin miner plans to double its mining operating fleet to about 6.0 ether per second in 2024.
Coherus BioSciences rose 35.8% after the company said the U.S. FDA has approved its drug delivery device for its infection-fighting treatment.
(Reporting by Shubham Batra and Bansari Mayur Kamdar in Bengaluru; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli)
