Directional Bias For The Day:

• S&P Futures are higher; trending up since 6:30 PM; bouncing off EMA20 on 15-minute chart at 7:15 AM
• The odds are for an up day with good chance of sideways move from pre-open levels around 2875.00, with elevated volatility – watch for break below 2863.00 for change of fortune
• Key economic data due:
  • Unemployment Claims ( 3169K vs. 3000K est.; prev. 3846K ) at 8:30 AM
  • Prelim Nonfarm Productivity (-2.5% vs. -5.4% est.; prev. 1.2%) at 8:30 AM
  • Prelim Unit Labor Costs (4.8% vs. 4.3% est.; prev. 0.9%) at 8:30 AM

Directional Bias Before Open:

Key Levels:

• Critical support levels for S&P 500 are 2879.37, 2847.65 and 2844.24
• Critical resistance levels for S&P 500 are 2891.11, 2897.84 and 2917.80
• Key levels for E-mini futures: break above 2886.25, the high of 6:00 AM on Wednesday and break below 2863.00, the low of 4:00 AM

Pre-Open

• On Wednesday at 4:00 PM, S&P futures (June 2020) closed at 2840.00 and the index closed at 2848.42 – a spread of about -8.50 points; futures closed at 2833.50 for the day; the fair value is +6.50
• Pre-NYSE session open, futures are higher – at 8:30 AM, S&P 500 futures were up by +40.25; Dow by +297 and NASDAQ by +123.50

Markets Around The World

• Markets in the East were mostly down – Tokyo was up; Singapore was closed for trading
• European markets are higher
• Currencies:
  

  Up	Down
  Dollar index USD/JPY USD/CHF AUD/USD NZD/USD	EUR/USD GBP/USD USD/CAD INR/USD

• Commodities:
  

  Up	Down
  Crude Oil NatGas Gold Silver Copper Platinum Palladium Sugar Cotton Cocoa	Coffee

• Bond
  • 10-yrs yield is at 0.695%, up from May 6 close of 0.711%;
  • 30-years is at 1.397%, up from 1.415%
  • 2-years yield is at 0.165% up from 0.185%
  • The 10-Year-&-2-Year spread is at 0.530 up from 0.526
• VIX
  • Is at 31.21; down -2.83 from May 6 close; above 5-day SMA;
  • Down from all time high of 85.47 on March 18; recent high 47.77 on April 21, recent low 30.54 on April 28
  • Sentiment: Risk-On

The trend and patterns on various time frames for S&P 500:

Previous Session

Major U.S. indices closed mostly lower on Wednesday, May 6 in mostly lower volume. Russell 2000 closed up. Dow Jones Industrial Average traded in higher volume. Indices opened higher and for most of the days traded sideways but declined sharply in the last half hour

From Briefing.com:

Mega-cap technology stocks carried the Nasdaq Composite to a 0.5% gain on Wednesday, but another late fade in the market left the S&P 500 (-0.7%), Dow Jones Industrial Average (-0.9%), and Russell 2000 (-0.8%) in negative territory.

[…]

That wasn’t the case today, but the S&P 500 sectors that house these companies — information technology (+0.7%), consumer discretionary (+0.3%), and communication services (-0.4%) — had done a good job in offsetting the losses in the other eight sectors, including utilities (-3.5%), energy (-2.6%), and financials (-2.3%).

[…]

The 2-yr yield was unchanged at 0.17%, while the 10-yr yield increased five basis points to 0.71%. The U.S. Dollar Index increased 0.5% to 100.18. WTI crude lost 2.4%, or $0.58, to $23.95/bbl.

[…]

• The ADP Employment Change report pointed to a net loss of 20.236 million nonfarm payrolls in April (Briefing.com consensus -21.5 million) while the March reading was revised down to -149,000 from -27,000.
• The weekly MBA Mortgage Applications Index increased 0.1% following a 3.3% decline in the prior week.