Futures Rise After Dow Sets Closing Record; S&P 500 on Pace for 8th Straight Week of Gains

Estée Lauder Stock Jumps After Deal Talks Dropped

FROM 15 minutes ago

Shares of Estée Lauder Cos. (EL) are rallying this morning after the cosmetics giant announced that it is no longer in talks to acquire a fellow makeup brand.

The company and Puig, a Spanish cosmetics group, said late Thursday that their talks over a potential acquisition, which started in late March, have ended without a deal.

Shares of Estée Lauder were up 13% in recent premarket trading, after entering the day having lost about a quarter of their value since the start of the year.

–Aaron McDade

SpaceX Is Lining Up a Huge IPO. The Numbers Show That Big Deals Don’t Guarantee Big Returns

FROM 29 minutes ago

SpaceX’s upcoming IPO could be the biggest new U.S. offering ever—many times over. But do big IPOs guarantee big returns? The numbers show that there’s no guarantee.

The Elon Musk–led rocket and satellite company—which on Wednesday submitted its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission—is reportedly planning to raise $75 billion next month in a deal that could give the company a valuation of between $1.75 trillion and $2 trillion. An IPO of that size would easily triple the previous U.S. record, currently held by Alibaba’s (BABA) $21.8 billion 2014 listing.

Only eight companies have raised more than $10 billion in a U.S. IPO. Three—ENEL, Deutsche Telekom, and AT&T Wireless—have since been delisted or acquired.

Read the full article here.

–Peter Gratton

Here’s How Much Traders Expect Salesforce Stock Could Move After Earnings

FROM 40 minutes ago

Salesforce is scheduled to report its latest quarterly earnings after the closing bell on Wednesday, with traders expecting a large move in the software maker’s stock.

Salesforce (CRM) shares are seen swinging up to 9% in either direction by the end of the week following the results, according to recent options pricing. A move of that size from Thursday’s close could see shares jump close to $192, recovering some of their recent losses. At the low end, shares could slip below $162, which would be their lowest level since early 2023.

The Slack parent company’s stock has lost about a third of its value this year, as worries that AI products will disrupt the software industry have pressured shares of Salesforce and a number of others in the sector in the last several months.

Bank of America analysts recently relaunched their coverage of Salesforce with an “underweight” rating and $160 price target, writing that they “expect a structural reset driven by AI transition,” that could include slow customer growth, limited ability to upsell customers to more of its services, and an “underwhelming” path to monetizing AI.

Read the full article here.

–Aaron McDade

Rising Gas Prices Are Hitting Household Budgets. Some Grocery Stores Are Eyeing Price Cuts In Response

FROM 1 hr 8 min ago

Shoppers are feeling the pinch at the pump. Grocers hope to offer some relief in the produce aisle. 

Kroger (KR) plans on testing price cuts on thousands of items in a bid to take share from low-cost rivals, according to a Bloomberg interview with CEO Greg Foran. “The reality is, the basket has to come down. And not everyone’s basket is the same,” said Foran. “It needs to be across thousands of products.”

U.S. retailers have been grappling with increasingly thrifty consumers ever since inflation soared to multi-decade highs in 2022. The pressure has been especially intense on food establishments like grocers and restaurants, whose prices consumers encounter on a near-daily basis. Diners have taken to social media to vent about fast-food prices, while soaring egg prices became a flashpoint in the 2024 election.

Restaurants responded by flooding the market with value meals, and grocers are slashing prices. “We’re continuing to invest in prices, extending the rollbacks we started in the second half of last year,” John Furner, CEO of Walmart (WMT), America’s largest grocer, said on an earnings call Thursday. The company has cut prices on 7,200 items, a more than 20% increase from last year, according to CFO John David Rainey. 

Read the full article here.

–Colin Laidley

Even With Rates Rising, Mortgages Are Still Cheaper Now Than They Were the Last 2 Springs

FROM 1 hr 23 min ago

For homebuyers hoping this spring would finally bring some relief, mortgage rates are again moving in the wrong direction. Freddie Mac’s weekly average for a new 30-year mortgage jumped to 6.51% today, the highest level since August 2025 and a notable increase from last week’s 6.36%.

Still, today’s rising rates may not be quite as discouraging as the headlines suggest. Compared with the spring homebuying seasons of 2024 and 2025, borrowers this year have generally seen lower mortgage rates overall—even with rates climbing in reaction to the Iran conflict.

The recent rise in mortgage rates has narrowed some of the progress buyers saw earlier this year—but it hasn’t erased it entirely. Investopedia’s Zillow-based average of 30-year mortgage rates fell to a more than three-year low of 6.16% on Feb. 27, the day the Iran conflict began. Since then, the average surged as high as 6.76% before slipping slightly to 6.74%.

Still, today’s rates are more affordable than what buyers saw during the 2024 and 2025 spring seasons. Rates on 30-year loans rose well above 7% in both of those periods, while the current average sits near the low end of the range buyers faced in those years.

Read the full article here.

–Sabrina Karl

As the SpaceX IPO Moves Closer, the Question Looms: Should You Buy the Stock?

FROM 1 hr 48 min ago

Now that we know a bit more about the SpaceX IPO, the question is inevitable: Should you invest in it?

The initial public offering of SpaceX, expected in June, could be be the biggest in history, and its business—rockets, satellites, and artificial intelligence—has characterists the market has been rewarding lately. At what price “SPCX” shares will sell when they land on the Nasdaq remains an outstanding question, but investors are already debating whether they can produce the kind of long-term returns the current hype implies. After investors got a glimpse of the company’s financials when its S-1 filing dropped, the reality that the company burns as much money as it collects set in, though some investors think the stock will zoom anyway.

The biggest reason could be a simple one: The CEO is Elon Musk, whose fanbase of investors—both lay and professional—believe he can accomplish the seemingly impossible. That stands to make SpaceX a hot ticket. “The story matters more than the fundamentals these days,” one user of Reddit’s WallStreetBets forum said Thursday.

The story as Musk tells it in the company’s IPO paperwork: “It’s about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past. And I can’t think of anything more exciting than going out there and being among the stars.”

Read the full article here.

–Crystal Kim

Gas Prices Are Headed for Record Highs—Or Are They?

FROM 2 hr 7 min ago

Gasoline may reach a record high this summer, but that doesn’t mean it’s taking the biggest bite out of your budget that it ever has.

If the Iran war isn’t settled by mid-summer and the Strait of Hormuz stays closed, the resulting oil shock could send the national average price for a gallon of unleaded gas above $5.03 a gallon, according to Patrick DeHaan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy. That would nudge the price above the record set in 2022, when the Ukraine conflict sent prices through the roof. The current national average stands at $4.55, according to GasBuddy.

However, if you adjust for inflation, fuel prices are actually much easier for household budgets today to absorb than during the energy crisis of 2008, based on data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tracks inflation by measuring prices for thousands of things people buy.

Making gasoline prices proportional to the resulting Consumer Price index shows how expensive gas is relative to everything else, and to incomes, which have risen more or less in proportion to inflation over the decades. This gives some idea of how much of your buying power is being taken up by gasoline.

Read the full article here.

–Diccon Hyatt

Stock Futures Tick Higher After Dow Sets Closing Record

FROM 2 hr 44 min ago

Futures contracts connected to the Dow Jones Industrial Average pointed up 0.3%.

S&P 500 futures were up 0.2%.

Nasdaq 100 futures also were 0.2% higher.