Overnight Developments
Futures are pointing to a tech-led risk-on open, driven by earnings rather than macro news. No significant geopolitical or central bank surprises hit overnight.
Palantir’s “otherworldly” quarter — Yahoo Finance / CNBC
Palantir reported Q2 after Monday’s close with EPS of $0.41 vs $0.33 expected and revenue of $1.94B vs $1.80B expected — revenue up 93% year over year, with US commercial revenue up 149% to $764 million. Management raised full-year revenue guidance to roughly $8.16B from a prior $7.65–7.66B. The stock jumped 12–15% in extended trading, and it is dragging the broader AI complex up with it. Affected sectors: Tech, Software, AI infrastructure
Caterpillar tops $20B in quarterly revenue — TheStreet
Caterpillar gained about 9% pre-market after sales and revenue topped $20 billion for the first time. As a Dow component with a high share price, CAT alone explains a meaningful chunk of the outsized move in Dow futures. Affected sectors: Industrials, Machinery
Semiconductors broadly bid — TipRanks
Memory and AI-adjacent names — Micron, SanDisk, AMD, NVIDIA and Intel — are all higher pre-market, a continuation of the AI trade rather than a single-company story. Affected sectors: Semiconductors, AI hardware
Futures & Pre-Market
Measured against Monday’s 4:00pm ET reference close, as of ~8:08am ET:
| Index | Futures | Change |
|---|---|---|
| S&P 500 | 7,653 | +0.4% |
| NASDAQ | 29,216 | +1.2% |
| DOW | 53,915 | +1.1% |
Note the unusual spread: the NASDAQ and Dow are both up over 1% while the S&P 500 lags at +0.4%. That divergence is real, not a data artifact — it says this is a narrow move concentrated in a handful of large caps (Palantir, Caterpillar, semis) rather than a broad-based rally. Breadth is the thing to watch today.
The Dow set a record high on Monday, so it enters this session already extended.
Watchlist Movers
A data caveat worth stating plainly: pre-market equity quotes from our data source were unreliable this morning — the 1-minute pre-market series returned hundreds of consecutive bars with zero volume (no actual trades), and the snapshot endpoint disagreed with them outright. Monday’s daily bars also came back with missing prices. Rather than publish percentages we cannot stand behind, here is only what independent reporting corroborates:
- INTC — higher, moving with the broader memory/AI semiconductor bid
- NVDA, TSM — higher, same semiconductor complex
- Nuclear names (OKLO, NNE, SMR) appeared to firm, but no catalyst could be confirmed
Treat specific pre-market percentages for individual names as unverified until the regular session opens and real volume prints.
International Markets
Asia was mixed and Europe is firmer. The Nikkei closed +0.3% and the Shanghai Composite +0.3%, while the Hang Seng lagged at -0.6%. In Europe, the FTSE 100 is +0.5% and the DAX +0.9%, the strongest of the major indices and consistent with the risk-on tone in US futures.
What to Watch at Open
Watch breadth, not the headline index level — the NASDAQ and Dow are up over 1% while the S&P 500 lags at +0.4%, which means a few large caps are carrying this open and a thin rally can fade fast. SpaceX reports its first quarterly results as a public company after the bell, so expect positioning in space and satellite names through the session.
This alert is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice.