MW U.S. stock futures fall ahead of big week for tech earnings

By Mike Murphy

After an encouraging week for Wall Street, U.S. stock futures fell late Sunday, ahead of a busy slate of quarterly earnings over the coming days.

Dow Jones Industrial Average futures (YM00) were recently down about 114 points, or 0.3%. S&P 500 futures (ES00) dipped about 0.3% and Nasdaq-100 futures (NQ00) fell 0.4%. Crude prices (CL.1) rose slightly, while bitcoin (BTCUSD) fell below the $94,000 level.

Stocks rose Friday for the fourth consecutive day, as the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average notched their longest winning streaks since January. All three major benchmarks booked their best weeks since April 11, according to Dow Jones Market Data, with the Dow DJIA up 2.5%, the S&P 500 SPX rising 4.6% and the Nasdaq COMP surging 6.7%.

Tech stocks rebounded following Google parent Alphabet Inc.'s $(GOOG)$ $(GOOGL)$ blowout earnings report, sparking optimism in the slate of results due this week from tech giants including Apple Inc. $(AAPL)$, Amazon.com Inc. $(AMZN)$, Meta Platforms Inc. $(META)$ and Microsoft Corp. $(MSFT)$.

Investors were buoyed last week by hopes that President Donald Trump will de-escalate his steep tariffs on Chinese goods. But Trump's trade war has rattled markets and shaken consumers, with a recent New York Times/Siena poll showing 76% of respondents disapproving of Trump's handling of the economy, and 55% opposing his use of tariffs.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent brushed off the polling numbers in an interview Sunday with ABC News' "This Week," calling the criticism "media driven." He also defended the Trump administration's back-and-forth with declaring new tariffs, then pausing some or carving out exceptions.

"It's called strategic uncertainty," Bessent told "This Week" anchor Martha Raddatz.

The Trump administration has said it's in the process of negotiating trade deals with more than 180 nations, but there have been scant results so far.

Also read: How stock-market investors on Wall Street are navigating the wait for trade deals.

In a recent Time magazine interview, Trump claimed to have already made 200 trade deals. Bessent walked that back a bit Sunday, clarifying that "I believe that he is referring to sub deals within the negotiations we're doing."

"Some of those are moving along very well," Bessent added. He also reiterated that he expects "de-escalation" with China in the short term, followed by an agreement in principle before an actual trade deal is worked out in the coming months.

But speaking on CBS News' "Face the Nation," Trump's former economic adviser, Gary Cohn, warned Sunday that U.S. consumers will start seeing the effects of Trump's trade war in the next two to four weeks. Cargo-ship traffic between China and the U.S. has plummeted, and some imported products will likely become scarce or much more expensive.

"We're a few weeks away from starting to see the early effects," Cohn said, adding that small business may be hurt the most. "They're either going out of business or they're just going to wait and see what happens," he said.

Cohn also noted that "tariffs are highly regressive... So the tariffs are going to affect the poorer people more."

More: What a plunge in shipping traffic from China says about tariffs, stocks and the economy

-Mike Murphy

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April 27, 2025 19:30 ET (23:30 GMT)

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