Stocks Rise Into Election Week: Futures Up, Oil Under $100, and the Market Stays Open on Election Day
Nasdaq futures led a Monday-morning bounce (+0.84 percent) after technology stocks dragged last week lower, oil fell below $100 on U.S.-Iran diplomacy hopes — and Tuesday's vote changes nothing about trading hours.
'Stocks' sat at No. 4 on the Google Trends US snapshot read by this newsroom this morning, and the premarket explains the searching. Ahead of Monday's open, futures on the Nasdaq 100 were up 0.84 percent, the S&P 500 up 0.51 percent and the Dow Jones Industrial Average up 0.55 percent, as of 5:38 a.m. Eastern, according to TipRanks' morning file — a bounce after a losing week in which technology and AI-related selling pulled the Nasdaq down 2 percent while the S&P 500 and the Dow each fell less than 1 percent.
The other mover was oil. U.S. crude fell below $100 a barrel, with West Texas Intermediate down 4.18 percent to $99.77 and Brent down 4.27 percent to $108.68, on hopes of a diplomatic resolution to the U.S.-Iran conflict; TipRanks reported Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying President Trump prefers negotiations over further military action, while noting reports that both countries are also preparing for possible action after the midterms. For a port-and-airline city, a four-dollar swing in crude on a Monday morning is not an abstraction.
The week's calendar is stacked on both sides of the vote. Apple and Palantir report Monday, with AMD, Pfizer, Qualcomm, McDonald's and Uber among the week's other earnings, and the October jobs report lands Friday, Nov. 6. And the question the search traffic keeps asking has a plain answer: the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq trade normal hours on Election Day, Tuesday, Nov. 3 — 9:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern — because Election Day is not a market holiday. Miami investors vote at their precincts and trade at their desks on the same schedule as any Tuesday.
