U.S. stock futures rose on Monday after following Friday’s advances. Futures of major benchmark indices were higher.

After a strong week on Wall Street, the Nasdaq Composite hit two consecutive records, while the S&P 500 nearly reached a new high on Friday.

President Donald Trump‘s new "reciprocal tariffs" took effect last week, and he announced that he would nominate the White House’s top economist, Stephen Miran, to a short-term seat on the Federal Reserve‘s Board of Governors.

Many companies are going to report earnings this week, including networking giant Cisco Systems Inc. CSCO, cloud computing company CoreWeave Inc. CRWV, and stablecoin issuer Circle Internet Group Inc. CRCL.

Meanwhile, the 10-year Treasury bond yielded 4.26% and the two-year bond was at 3.75%. The CME Group's FedWatch tool‘s projections show markets pricing an 88.4 % likelihood of the Federal Reserve cutting the current interest rates for the Sept. 17 decision.

The SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust SPY and Invesco QQQ Trust ETF QQQ, which track the S&P 500 index and Nasdaq 100 index, respectively, were higher in premarket on Monday. The SPY was up 0.21% at $638.50, while the QQQ advanced 0.18% to $575.59, according to Benzinga Pro data.

Cues From Last Session:

Real estate and utilities stocks bucked the overall market trend, closing the session lower, while most sectors on the S&P 500 closed on a positive note, with communication services, information technology, and financial stocks recording the biggest gains on Friday.

U.S. stocks settled higher on Friday. The Nasdaq Composite also jumped to a new record intraday high on Friday.

The major indices posted a winning week, with the Dow gaining about 1.4% and the S&P 500 adding 2.4% last week. The Nasdaq recorded a 3.9% surge during the week. On the trade front, President Trump unveiled a surprise import tariff on gold bars, a move expected to pressure Switzerland's refining industry.

Apple Inc. AAPL climbed 4.2% on Friday, extending weekly gains to over 12% and recording its strongest week since August 2020. Under Armour, Inc. UAA stock dipped around 18% on Friday after the company reported first-quarter fiscal 2026 results that met or exceeded internal expectations but missed Wall Street estimates.

The Trade Desk Inc. TTD tumbled over 38% after the company reported second-quarter financial results.

The Dow Jones index ended 207 points or 0.47% higher at 44,175.61, whereas the S&P 500 index rose 0.78% to 6,389.45. Nasdaq Composite advanced 0.98% to 21,450.02, and the small-cap gauge, Russell 2000, gained 0.17% to end at 2,218.42.

Insights From Analysts:

According to Ed Yardeni from Yardeni Research, “The sky seems to be the limit for the cloud providers.”

He explains this as “more and more of us” are using AI’s large language models, like GROK, ChatGPT, Claude, and Copilot, as tools to do research, to write software, to create content, and to work more productively.

These AI tools are all processing and storing our interactions with them in the cloud and learning from these interactions to become more useful to us.

“As the tools become more useful, the cloud companies earn more, and they must spend more to expand their data center capacity. Our collective ability to process more data leads us all to create more data to process. And so on. So the sky really is the limit!” he added.

He also highlighted that better-than-expected earnings reported by the Magnificent 7 contributed to the better-than-expected earnings results of the S&P 500 companies in aggregate during Q1 and Q2.

“Q1’s earnings rose almost twice as fast as was expected just before the earnings reporting season. Q2’s growth rate may be on track to be three times greater than expected,” he said.

Talking about the expected July inflation report this week, Yardeni added that “the odds are low that we'll see downside surprises in July CPI inflation data. There's little doubt that tariff effects are boosting durable goods inflation, as they did in June. But the risk of a big upward surprise is tempered by signs that rents and used car prices are cooling.”

He highlighted the Cleveland Fed's Inflation Nowcasting model, which has the CPI rising 3.04% in July and 3.02% in August. “Those would be considered too hot to justify Fed easing,” Yardeni adds.

Meanwhile, talking about the new tariffs, senior economist Mohamed El-Erian said that it remains premature for economists to confidently assess the full domestic and international macroeconomic implications of America's new tariff regime.

He highlighted that to date, many companies appear to have utilized existing inventories, absorbed costs through profit margins, and exerted pressure on foreign suppliers as temporary buffers, awaiting a clearer picture of the tariff regime (content and durability).

Also, foreign suppliers seem to have adopted a similar wait-and-see approach. However, both domestic firms and their international counterparts now face more challenging, longer-term strategic decisions regarding pricing, supply chain adjustments, and market focus.

“Given the inherent differences in tariff sensitivity, pricing power, demand elasticities, and cash reserves, outcomes are highly likely to vary significantly across sectors and individual companies,” he said, adding that “economists will require more data and observation to confidently quantify the precise impacts on global growth and inflation.”

See Also: How to Trade Futures

Upcoming Economic Data

Here's what investors will be keeping an eye on for the week;

Stocks In Focus:

Commodities, Gold, And Global Equity Markets:

Crude oil futures were trading lower in the early New York session by 0.52% to hover around $63.55 per barrel.

Gold Spot US Dollar fell 0.97% to hover around $3,365.67 per ounce. Its last record high stood at $3,500.33 per ounce. The U.S. Dollar Index spot was unchanged at the 98.1800 level.

Asian markets rose on Friday, except South Korea's Kospi index. India's S&P BSE Sensex, Australia's ASX 200, China’s CSI 300, Hong Kong's Hang Seng, and Japan's Nikkei 225 indices rose. European markets were mostly lower in early trade.

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