Stocks looked set to rise on Thursday as investors tried to make sense of a mixed bag of Big Tech earnings, while precious metals were once again making eye-popping moves.
Futures tracking the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 50 points, or 0.1%. S&P 500 futures added 0.2%, and contracts tied to the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 gained 0.3%.
The three indexes went nowhere on Wednesday, after the latest Federal Reserve policy meeting offered no surprises for the market.
The bigger story came after the close, when three of the Magnificent Seven megacap group reported quarterly earnings. Microsoft forecast softer-than-expected revenue growth for its Azure cloud division, Meta Platforms signposted another sizable increase in spending on artificial intelligence, and Tesla reported a smaller drop in operating profit than Wall Street was expecting.
None of those results looked likely to boost the broader market—but they probably won’t put an end to the ongoing equity rally, either. The next big event for investors is earnings from iPhone maker Apple, which is set to report late Thursday.
“Participants will probably want to see a fair bit more from Apple today, as well as Amazon and Alphabet next week, [but] there’s nothing here to make me want to reconsider my bullish equity view,” said Michael Brown, strategist at the foreign-exchange brokerage Pepperstone. “
On the whole, earnings growth remains robust, the underlying economy remains solid, plus both monetary and fiscal tailwinds persist,” he added.
The rally in precious metals showed no signs of slowing down on Thursday, with gold futures surging 4% to top $5,500 an ounce for the first time ever. The weaker dollar and ongoing geopolitical tensions have sent investors piling into the haven asset in early 2026.
The greenback slid 0.3% against a weighted basket of its peers, sinking as investors fretted about potential U.S. military action in Iran. West Texas Intermediate U.S. crude oil prices jumped 2.2% to $64.58 a barrel, surging due to the threat of a conflict in the Middle East.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury note climbed 2 basis points to 4.27%. Bitcoin, the large-cap cryptocurrency that tends to reflect broader risk sentiment, slid 0.8% to $88,132 over the past 24 hours.