By Peter Nurse
Investing.com -- U.S. stocks are seen opening largely unchanged Tuesday, with investors awaiting more clues on Federal Reserve’s thinking as the earnings season continues.
At 7:15 AM ET (1115 GMT), the Dow futures contract was down 20 points, or 0.1%, S&P 500 futures traded largely flat, while Nasdaq 100 futures climbed 25 points, or 0.2%.
Fed officials have started the debate over when and how they should taper the $120 billion monthly asset purchases, pledging not to start “until substantial further progress” has been made toward its goals of maximum employment and 2% inflation.
However, what qualifies “substantial” progress has not been defined, and thus market participants are studying speeches from the policymakers for clues over when this tapering will start.
Chicago Fed President Charles Evans is set to speak later Tuesday and Kansas City Fed President Esther George on Wednesday.
Elsewhere, the U.S. Senate is set later Tuesday to vote to pass one of the largest infrastructure investment bills in decades, providing an additional $1 billion stimulus to the market.
The second-quarter corporate earnings season is slowing down, but there are still a number of high-profile companies releasing results.
AMC Entertainment (NYSE:AMC) is likely to be in the spotlight after the troubled movie theater chain reported a lower loss than expected after the close Monday, also announcing it would begin accepting Bitcoin at all U.S. locations this year.
Coinbase Global (NASDAQ:COIN) is set to report quarterly earnings later Tuesday, as are streaming television service Fubotv (NYSE:FUBO) and security software maker McAfee (NASDAQ:MCFE).
Also of interest, the Wall Street Journal reported that Canadian Pacific (NYSE:CP) is set to make a new offer for Kansas City Southern (NYSE:KSU), valuing each Kansas share near $300, or about $27 billion, which would be an 11.3% premium to Monday’s closing price.
Workday (NASDAQ:WDAY) will also be in the spotlight after it announced a tie-up with Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) that will allow its clients to run its applications on Google Cloud.
Oil prices bounced Tuesday after falling to three-week lows during the previous session ahead of the release of the latest U.S. crude supply data.
By 7:15 AM ET, U.S. crude futures were up 1.9% at $67.73 a barrel, after falling 2.6% on Monday, while Brent futures gained 1.5% at $70.09 a barrel, having dropped 2.3% during the previous session.
The American Petroleum Institute is due to release the weekly oil inventories later in the session, with last week seeing a fall of almost 900,000 barrels, weaker than the expected draw of 2.9 million barrels.
Crude has been hit hard of late on concerns the fast-spreading delta variant will hit oil demand in China, the second largest consumer of oil in the world.