S&P 500, Nasdaq futures rise as AI optimism blots out US shutdown

Warren Buffett announced his biggest deal in years on Thursday with Berkshire Hathaway’s $9.7 billion acquisition of Occidental Petroleum’s (OXY) chemical division.

AP reports:

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Despite Amazon’s (AMZN) cloud-computing business helping it’s shares rise for almost two decades, the eCommerce giant is now facing increasing pressure from rivals Microsoft (MSFT) and Oracle (ORCL), impacting its stock appeal.

Bloomberg News reports:

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Here’s a look at some of the top stocks trending in premarket trading:

Equifax Inc. (EFX) stock slid 10% in premarket trading on Friday. Equifax Canada recently reported a sharp rise in credit card fraud, which analysts say could impact the company’s financial performance.

Alibaba (BABA) stock rose 2% before the bell on Thursday after JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) raised its price target for the eCommerce giant.

Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. (005930.KS) gained 3% and SK hynix Inc. (000660.KS) shares rose 9% on Thursday following a deal with OpenAI to support the ChatGPT maker’s expansive Stargate artificial intelligence data centre project.

No beating around the bush from Goldman Sachs this morning — it still loves gold as an investment.

“Still our favorite long commodity,” Daan Struyven and other analysts said in a note. Gold (GC=F) prices are up 46% year to date.

Here’s why Struyven still sees gold shining:

It’s almost earnings season!

And that means the start of interesting pre-earnings notes from the Street.

A few that caught my attention pre-5am:

Chipotle: Bernstein analyst Danilo Gargiulo leaves an Outperform rating on Chipotle (CMG). But he all but hints the stock could get hit again on third quarter earnings. “With persisting macro pressures and a weakening labor market, we expect Chipotle’s same-store sales to miss 3Q25 expectations. Rather than by ‘Mexican food fatigue’, ‘excessive pricing’ or ‘rising competition’, we continue to believe that the relative demand weakness is driven by consumer confidence declining, greater exposure to more impacted demographics, and partially by the increased promotional environment that is compressing consumers’ willingness to pay $10+ for their lunch. We are also conscious that rising beef prices may impact restaurant level margins given Chipotle’s commitment not to take price near term,” says Gargiulo. My recent Opening Bid Unfiltered podcast with Chipotle CEO Scott Boatwright for my insight into the company at this juncture.

PepsiCo: No rest for the weary at PepsiCo (PEP) as it contends with new activist investor Elliott Management and a largely bearish Wall Street. RBC Capital Markets analyst Nik Modi is keeping a Sector-Perform rating PepsiCo, but similar to Gargiulo on Chipotle sound quite bearish on PepsiCo into earnings. “We are expecting another difficult quarter for PepsiCo headlined by continued sluggish top line results in North America as snacking volumes continue to be a challenge, with muted PBNA [North America beverages] trends and pockets of international softness (Coca-Cola (KO) was talking down international beverage volumes in early September),” Modi said.

Alibaba: Alibaba (BABA) is seeing interest today on the Yahoo Finance platform amid estimate raises from JP Morgan analyst Alex Yao. The stock is up 36% in the past month, and 117% on the year. Explains Yao: “Alibaba’s share price has outperformed the sector average, as measured by KWEB, by 364 percentage points in the past three months, due to better-than-expected cloud revenue growth rate in 2Q25 and management’s confident articulation of its investment strategy in food delivery and quick commerce, in our view. After attending Alibaba’s Apsara conference last week in Hangzhou, we are incrementally more positive on AliCloud for its future revenue generation opportunity with external clients (i.e. cloud revenue) and synergy with domestic ecommerce. We believe the positive development in both cloud and China domestic ecommerce warrants a higher valuation multiple as the narrative of Alibaba shifts towards ‘a tier-one asset in China Internet’ from ‘a domestic ecommerce market share loser.”

Fermi’s (FRMI) shares rose 14% before the bell on Thursday after closing 54% up in their Nasdaq debut on Wednesday. The energy real estate investment trust (REIT), founded by former US Secretary of Energy Rick Perry, raised raised $682.5 million in its US listing.

Reuters reports:

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