Stocks Rise in Early Trade as Tech Selloff, Apple Earnings and Midterms Loom

Stock futures moved higher as Wall Street opened a week packed with corporate earnings, U.S. midterm elections and a closely watched jobs report. The gains follow a losing week for U.S. stocks, in which selling pressure in technology shares weighed on the major indexes. The Nasdaq Composite dropped about 2% over the week, while the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average each fell less than 1%.

A narrow tech selloff

Yahoo Finance calculations put the loss in market value of the biggest AI and chip stocks at about $5 trillion since October 6. Over the same period, the other 625 large U.S. stocks in that tally added about $1.3 trillion, according to the same analysis. The S&P 500 slipped about 0.6% last week, yet nine of its 11 sectors rose about 1% or more.

The Nasdaq suffered its worst losses since March 2025 in October, while the Dow rose almost 2% as investors moved into defensive areas such as healthcare. Analysts differ on what comes next. One reading of history suggests the tech decline could deepen, while another points to the period from the end of a midterm-election October through the following June, when the S&P 500 has risen every time since 1950, according to Yahoo Finance.

Warren Pies of 3Fourteen Research said he saw nothing fundamentally broken in the AI trade, though he described the technicals as a different story. Mike Dickson, head of research and quantitative strategies at Horizon, said investors were finding return potential in other kinds of stocks.

Apple and other earnings

Apple is scheduled to report after the bell on Monday, with iPhone 18 sales in focus. Yahoo Finance said the company closed Friday worth about $5.03 trillion, ahead of Nvidia at about $4.93 trillion, and was the only "Magnificent Seven" stock beating the S&P 500 this year, up about 27% compared with about 11% for the index. Palantir is also due to report Monday, and McDonald's and Qualcomm are slated to report later in the week.

Earlier in the week, Anthropic publicly filed for an IPO, a development that lifted AI-linked stocks. Selling resumed later as Alphabet and Microsoft posted lower-than-expected capital spending forecasts, a sign to some investors that AI spending could be slowing. Amazon left its full-year capex guidance unchanged.

Midterms, jobs data and oil

Voters go to the polls on Tuesday. Democrats are expected to take control of the House of Representatives, while control of the Senate remains uncertain, according to CNBC. Many investors are watching the vote, though analysts quoted in the reports noted that stocks have historically tended to stay steady regardless of which party controls Congress.

The October jobs report is scheduled for release on Friday. Economists polled by Dow Jones expect an increase of about 55,000 jobs for the month.

Oil prices also shape the mood. West Texas Intermediate crude settled above $104 a barrel on Friday, its highest close since mid-September, before easing in Sunday night trading to about $102.41. Brent fell to about $111.68. Yahoo Finance reported that the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively shut in the ninth month of the Iran war, and that OPEC+ kept its December output targets unchanged.

Asia and what we know so far

Asian markets were mixed. Japan's Nikkei 225 and the Topix both traded lower early Monday, while South Korea's Kospi fell after opening. Hong Kong's Hang Seng and mainland China's CSI 300 rose after reports that Chinese financial regulators would meet banks and securities firms to discuss steps to support the domestic stock market. Shares of Kioxia fell about 14% after the Japanese memory chipmaker said flash memory prices were stalling.

For now, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq futures point to a modestly higher open, but the direction of tech stocks, Apple's results, the midterm vote and the jobs report are all still unresolved. Investors will get the first clues from Apple's earnings after the close on Monday.