Wall Street Awaits More Economic and Earnings Data

Our new trading week does not begin until Tuesday, when we will also resume Q4 earnings season starting ahead of the opening bell. Today, the market is closed to commemorate the birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the foremost Civil Rights activist of the 20th century in the USA.

The Civil Rights story is now stuff of legend, starting back when Rosa Parks declined to give up her seat on the bus to a white passenger, in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955. Mere days later, 26-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. was elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which led to a boycott of the local bus system and then blossomed into a national Civil Rights movement.

That movement manifest itself in federal legislation in three stages: a Civil Rights Act in 1957, a more comprehensive version cited most often in history texts in 1964, and a more thorough Voting Rights Act signed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965. Without Dr King’s organizational and oratorial efforts, it’s quite possible Civil Rights may have never passed through Congress the way it had. For that, President Ronald Reagan designated MLK Day a federal holiday back in 1983.

What to Expect from the Stock Market This Week

We’ll start with what we expect on the economic report landscape: on Thursday morning, the delayed November Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) report is due. We’re skipping over the October report due to the federal government shutdown which lasted a month and a half this past fall. Last time around, the September report, we saw +2.8% on both headline and core, and the last time we saw a decline in headline PCE was back in April of last year, when it was +2.3%.

Along with PCE numbers — which are the preferred view on inflation for Fed Chair Jerome Powell (who remains in his current position despite many slings and arrows trained on him, mostly from the White House) — comes the quarterly Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Q3 2025, again delayed because of the government shutdown. This time around will be the first revision from the +4.3% originally announced, and is expected to come in-line. It is also stellar growth compared with the -0.6% reported in Q1 2025.

Also Thursday morning, Initial Jobless Claims are expected to be back above +200K once again, from +198K reported last week. Despite notable weakness in monthly jobs numbers from both Automatic Data Processing (ADP) in the private sector and non-farm payrolls from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), jobless claims figures have been pristine. Combining these realities have led analysts to designate this a “no hire, no fire” environment, although the jury is still out on the overall labor market early in 2026.

Q4 Earnings Reports Due Tuesday

Because we’re seeing Q4 earnings season pick up the pace starting this week, we’re only going to focus on Tuesday’s reports. (Monday is mostly devoid of earnings numbers due to MLK Day.) Ahead of the opening bell, multinational conglomerate 3M (MMM) and homebuilder D.R. Horton (DHI) come out with earnings results. After the close, we hear from streaming giant Netflix (NFLX), United Airlines (UAL) and Interactive Brokers Group (IBKR).

Of these, only Interactive Brokers has a buy rating (Zacks Rank #2), expected to grow by +2% on its bottom line and +4.3% on the top. Netflix, a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold), looks to keep its storybook growth going: +27.9% on earnings and +16.8% on revenues, as the company continues its outreach into global markets. D.R. Horton hopes to surprise investors by improving on -25% earnings growth expected on -12% revenues.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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