Wall Street set to bounce back after tech selloff

(Reuters) – Wall Street was set to open higher on Thursday, as the tech-heavy Nasdaq attempts to rebound from its worst day since 2011, with strong earnings reports from a raft of companies including Microsoft and Ford helping sentiment.

Microsoft jumped 2.8 percent in premarket trading after topping consensus estimates for revenue and profit, helped by strong demand for its Azure cloud computing and Office 365 software products.

Ford Motor, which is struggling with sales in China, surged 4.0 percent as its earnings report raised hopes for a strong finish to the year, while Raytheon gained 2.5 percent after the U.S. defense contractor raised its full-year forecast.

The reports offered hope to Wall Street, battered this week by a series of sluggish outlooks from manufacturers and chipmakers worried about the impact of tariffs and a slowdown in China on profits and global growth.

That, along with worries ranging from rising borrowing costs and bond yields to Italy’s budget and upcoming U.S. mid-term elections, sparked a rout on Wall Street on Wednesday, pushing the Nasdaq into correction territory and erasing all the yearly gains on the S&P 500 and the blue-chip Dow.

“There’s a sense of nervousness and caution because a lot of people were caught off guard by the drop yesterday,” Scott Brown, chief economist at Raymond James in St. Petersburg, Florida said.

“At this point it’s all about sentiment. People are looking for things to settle down and I think we need to see more concrete evidence of that.”

At 8:50 a.m. ET, Dow e-minis were up 107 points, or 0.43 percent. S&P 500 e-minis were up 13 points, or 0.49 percent and Nasdaq 100 e-minis were up 60.75 points, or 0.89 percent.

Brown cautioned that a rebound was probably not the best thing in a volatile market. “We’re in sort of a panic phase. I think we’re going to go back and forth for awhile.”

Results from S&P 500 companies have pushed up third-quarter profit growth estimates to 22.4 percent from an earlier 21.6 percent, but the run of dour outlooks has pulled down fourth-quarter growth estimates to 19.5 percent from 20 percent, according to Refinitiv data.

Advanced Micro Devices plunged 20.5 percent after the chipmaker forecast fourth-quarter revenue below estimates, but that was offset by encouraging forecast from others including Xilinx.

Xilinx rose 12.0 percent, while Intel, AMD’s chief rival, was up 2.0 percent ahead of its quarterly report, due after the bell.

Google-parent Alphabet and Amazon were all up more than 2.2 percent ahead of their results, due after market on Thursday.

Apple and Facebook also rose more than 1.7 percent.

Twitter rose 11.1 percent after strong ad sales boost third-quarter profit, while Tesla surged 9.5 percent after the electric carmaker made good on billionaire Chief Executive Elon Musk’s promise of a quarterly profit.