MW U.S. stock futures rise after a wild week on Wall Street, ahead of key jobs and inflation reports
By Mike Murphy
Investors will be looking closely at the January jobs report, coming Wednesday.
U.S. stock index futures rose Sunday, ahead of key employment and inflation data coming later this week.
Dow Jones Industrial Average futures (YM00) were up more than 100 points, or 0.2%, late Sunday. S&P 500 futures (ES00) advanced 0.4% and Nasdaq-100 futures (NQ00) were up 0.6% after a roller-coaster week that left market-watchers exhausted.
Wall Street capped a wild week with sharp gains Friday, with the Dow DJIA closing above 50,000 for the first time ever and closing up 2.5% on the week. Despite a nearly 2% surge on Friday, the S&P 500 SPX ended the week down 0.1%, while the Nasdaq COMP lost 1.8% on the week, despite a 2.2% rally on Friday.
After slumping below the $64,000 level on Thursday, bitcoin (BTCUSD) clawed back over the weekend and was last trading below $71,000, still well off its record high above $126,000, reached in October. Gold (GC00) and silver (SI00) gained Sunday, after highly volatile trading last week.
Oil prices fell, amid worries that the U.S. will soon take military action against Iran, following fresh sanctions announced Friday and after nuclear talks made little progress. West Texas Intermediate crude (CL.1), the U.S. benchmark, was down about 1%, along with Brent crude (BRN00), the global benchmark.
Investors this week will be focused on the January jobs and consumer-price reports, both coming Wednesday. While experts predict modest employment numbers, disappointing data could send the market back into convulsions. However, signs of a stabilizing job market could soothe nerves, especially if they're combined with encouraging inflation data.
Read more: The labor market was bad last year. Will investors get stung by a poor January jobs report, too?
Software stocks have taken a beating over the past week-plus, following AI developments that made suddenly cautious investors wonder if the booming technology was an existential threat to traditional software companies, while big concerns remain about tech companies' massive spending on AI infrastructure.
Microsoft $(MSFT)$ lost 5% last week, while Salesforce (CRM) slid 9%, Oracle $(ORCL)$ dropped nearly 11% and ServiceNow (NOW) slid more than 14%.
See more: Wall Street's wild week rattles investors' confidence while highlighting a growing divide within markets
Wedbush analysts led by Dan Ives said in a note Sunday that those worries are unfounded. "We believe the market is baking in a doomsday scenario for software companies in the near term, which we believe is extremely overblown, as many customers won't be willing to put their data at risk to capitalize on AI implementation strategies until there is less risk with these migration projects," they wrote. They added that the selloff in Salesforce and ServiceNow, in particular, "are way overdone," and that they expect both companies to be "core participants in the AI revolution."
But Stephen Innes, managing partner at SPI Asset Management, said in a pair of weekend notes that investors' sentiment has made a clear break from the past. "The AI tide is no longer lifting all boats. It is starting to sort them," he said late Friday.
"For most of the past decade, megacap tech earnings functioned as the market's circuit breaker," he wrote in a Saturday note. "Whenever confidence dipped, the switch was thrown, and the system rebooted."
"This time, the mechanism failed to engage," he continued. "The earnings prints were serviceable, but they did not alter the forward path... Investors are no longer underwriting ambition on faith... Capex without upward revision is no longer a growth narrative."
After a recent spate of Big Tech earnings that roiled markets, the coming week will see a lighter calendar of quarterly results, topped by tech and consumer-focused companies such as CoreWeave (CRWV), Coca-Cola $(KO)$, CVS Health $(CVS)$, Cisco $(CSCO)$, McDonald's $(MCD)$, T-Mobile $(TMUS)$ and Anheuser-Busch $(BUD)$.
-Mike Murphy
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 08, 2026 19:35 ET (00:35 GMT)
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