Investors Keenly Awaiting FOMC Direction

Pre-market future are on the wane at this hour, after closing mixed last week with the Nasdaq far outperforming the other major indexes. The Dow is -53 points, -0.11%, the S&P 500 is -7 points, -0.10%, the Nasdaq -37 points, -0.13% and the small-cap Russell 2000 is -10, -0.39%. Trading feels volatile ahead of the bell, however; it feels like these numbers might change before the end of this article is written.

We have no major economic reports hitting the tape today, but the week will have plenty of grist for the mill: Case-Shiller home prices and Consumer Confidence will be out tomorrow; Durable Goods, Housing Starts/Building Permits, U.S. Trade Balance, and Retail/Wholesale Inventories come out Wednesday; and Weekly Jobless Claims will join the Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE), Q1 GDP, the Chicago Business Barometer and U.S. Leading Economic Indicators (LEI) will all be released on Thursday.

Wednesday afternoon also brings us the interest rate decision from the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC). The decision itself won’t be meaningful — there is virtually zero chance the Fed makes a move from the 3.50-3.75% it had established at the end of 2025. But this will be the final Fed meeting with Fed Chair Jerome Powell at the helm; now that charges against him by the Trump administration have been dropped, the path for former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh to replace him looks clear.

Warsh himself has a history of being a contrarian among voting Fed members: when Ben Bernanke chaired the FOMC during the Obama years, Warsh was a staunch advocate for rolling back the Fed’s balance sheet and raising rates quickly following the mortgage crisis that resulted in a global financial meltdown. These days, Warsh is aligned strongly with President Trump in his willingness to cut interest rates from their current plateau.

It won’t be an easy task for Warsh, as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and global tariff measures are putting upward pressure on inflation. Only a collapse of the labor market — currently flat but not in decline — would bring a traditional methodology toward lowering rates from here. Warsh is no stranger to being in the minority on the Fed, but in order to satisfy the president he will have his work cut out for him.

Q1 Earnings Results for Today: VZ, DPZ

Verizon VZ shares are up this morning after a 6-cent beat on its Q1 bottom line to $1.28 per share. Revenues came in a tad light, -1.7%, to $34.44 billion for the quarter, but subscriber growth was enough for investors to add to Verizon’s +13% stock gains year to date.

Domino’s Pizza DPZ missed expectations on both top and bottom lines for its Q1 report ahead of the open, with earnings of $4.13 per share short of the projected $4.29, with revenues of $1.15 billion lower than estimates by -1.35%. Shares are down nearly another -7% in today’s pre-market, adding to the -11.75% losses for the stock year to date.

After today’s close, we’ll see new earnings results from Nucor NUE and Bed Bath & Beyond BBBY. Wednesday afternoon is when a majority of the “Magnificent 7” companies report: Alphabet GOOGL, Amazon AMZN, Meta Platforms META and Microsoft MSFT.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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