Stock Futures Tick Higher to End Week; Gold Recrosses $4,000

Stock futures pointed slightly higher Friday, a day after the three major indexes closed lower, while gold futures went back above $4,000 an ounce as the length of the U.S. government shutdown reached double digits.

Futures associated with the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average, benchmark S&P 500, and tech-heavy Nasdaq all were up about 0.1%. Yesterday, the Dow, S&P 500, and Nasdaq ended down a respective 0.5%, 0.3%, and 0.1% after the S&P 500 and Nasdaq hit fresh intraday records.

Gold futures, which have soared more than 50% this year, resumed their ascent after closing back below the $4,000 threshold Thursday.

The 10-year Treasury yield—which affects borrowing costs on all sorts of loans—slipped to 4.11% from 4.14% at Thursday’s close. Bitcoin ticked higher to about $121,500. The U.S. dollar index, which tracks the value of the greenback against a basket of foreign currencies, slipped 0.3% to 99.28. West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures was down 1% to $60.95 per barrel.

Friday is the 10th day of the U.S. government shutdown, and without official data releases, investors may pay extra attention to the University of Michigan’s preliminary consumer sentiment reading for October.

In corporate news, Applied Digital (APLD) shares soared 25% in premarket trading after the developer of data centers reported better-than-expected quarterly revenue and announced it had finalized a new lease agreement with CoreWeave (CRWV) for an additional 150 megawatts at its North Dakota campus.

Nvidia (NVDA) shares, which hit an all-time high yesterday, are up nearly 1% further before the bell. The world’s most valuable publicly traded company now has a market capitalization of about $4.7 trillion after the stock gained 4% over the prior two sessions.

Elsewhere, shares of Qualcomm (QCOM) slipped 1.5% after Chinese regulators opened an antitrust probe into the firm’s acquisition of Israeli chip firm Autotalks; Levi Strauss (LEVI) stock dropped about 6% despite stronger-than-expected results from the jeans maker; and shares of Stellantis (STLA) advanced 1.5% after the Chrysler and Jeep parent reported third-quarter shipment estimates of 1.3 million units, up 13% year-over-year, mostly driven by increases in North America.