Stocks poised to rise at open
Stocks in the U.S. are poised to open higher on Wednesday as investors await corporate earnings from Bank of America (NYSE: BAC), U.S. Bancorp (NYSE: USB), PNC Financial Services Group Inc (NYSE: PNC), and Abbott Laboratories (NYSE: ABT).
Netflix Inc (NASDAQ: NFLX), eBay Inc (NASDAQ: EBAY), and International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE: IBM) will report after the closing bell.
As of 5:07 a.m. ET, futures on the blue-chip Dow were up 39 points, or 0.14% to 27,367. Futures on the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 rose 20.75 points, or 0.26% to 7,963.50 while those on the broader S&P 500 climbed 3,011.62.
Oil turns higher after U.S. inventory data
Oil prices jumped on Wednesday after U.S. crude inventories declined less than forecast. The American Petroleum Institute (API) said on Tuesday that crude inventories dropped by 1.4 million barrels in the week ended July 12 to 460 million. Analysts had been expecting a decline of 2.7 million barrels.
As of 0636 GMT, international-benchmark Brent crude oil futures rose $0.26, or 0.4% at $64.60. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures climbed $0.12, or 0.2% at $57.68.
EU plans to open a formal investigation into Amazon over use of sales data
Bloomberg is reporting that the head of the European Union’s competition division is set to open a full probe into Amazon.com (NASDAQ: AMZN) within days. Margrethe Vestager launched a preliminary inquiry into the e-commerce giant last year.
She has hinted that she wants to escalate the probe to look into how the company uses data on its third-party merchants that sell through its Marketplace platform. Shares of Amazon were little changed in premarket trading hours.
