My top 10 things to watch Thursday, Dec. 8, 2022
1. U.S. stock futures point to a higher open after the S&P 500 dropped five sessions in a row, including Monday and Tuesday’s sharp back-to-back declines. Concern that the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes may tip the economy into recession has been dogging Wall Street of late.
2. Club holding Pioneer Natural Resources (PXD) price target lower to $260 per share from $290 at KeyBanc. However, analysts keep their overweight (buy) rating. Analysts blame recently lower natural gas and oil prices. They also cited uncertainty around China’s zero-Covid policy, even as Beijing appears to be easing restrictions as we wrote about Wednesday.
3. Pentagon awards a $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, or JWCC, cloud contract. It will be split among three Club holdings — Alphabet‘s (GOOGL) Google, Microsoft (MSFT) and Amazon (AMZN) — as as well Oracle (ORCL).
4. Baird downgrades Salesforce (CRM) to a neutral rating from an outperform (buy), citing turnover in the executive ranks, including co-CEO Bret Taylor. Analysts cut price target to $150 per share from $200.
