NEW YORK, Jan 8, 2026, 05:49 (EST)
U.S. stock index futures slipped on Thursday morning as investors turned cautious ahead of Friday’s U.S. jobs report, while defense shares jumped after President Donald Trump called for a $1.5 trillion military budget in 2027. At 05:08 a.m. ET, Dow futures were down 0.30%, S&P 500 futures fell 0.22% and Nasdaq 100 futures eased 0.31%; RTX gained 4.9% in premarket trading and Lockheed Martin climbed 7.2%. “While details are unclear and implementation cumbersome, a move towards more government intervention would create uncertainty and add to some risk premium in the markets,” said Mohit Kumar, an economist at Jefferies. 1
The early pullback comes after a strong start to 2026 for risk assets, but traders are still treating geopolitics as a live wire — from Venezuela’s oil flows to talk around Greenland — and the market has started to price a little more noise. European aerospace and defense stocks hit fresh highs, oil clawed back above $60 a barrel and Wall Street futures softened. “What investors are realising is that the threat of geopolitics is not going away,” said Peter McLean, head of multi-asset portfolio solutions at Stonehage Fleming Investment Management. 2
Friday’s nonfarm payrolls report — the government’s monthly jobs tally excluding farm work — is a focal point because it can shift expectations for Federal Reserve rate policy. It is due at 08:30 a.m. ET. 3
On Wednesday, the S&P 500 fell 0.34% to 6,920.93 and the Dow slid 0.94% to 48,996.08, while the Nasdaq added 0.16% to 23,584.28 as investors rotated back into some large AI-linked names, including Nvidia and Alphabet. “Buy tech and forget about it,” said Jake Dollarhide, chief executive officer of Longbow Asset Management. The S&P 500 is trading at about 22 times expected earnings, above its five-year average of 19, according to LSEG data. 4
Trump’s comments about limiting big investors’ access to single-family homes hit homebuilders and housing-linked firms, with D.R. Horton down 3.6% and PulteGroup off 3.2%, while Blackstone briefly fell more than 9% before paring the move. Elsewhere, Warner Bros. Discovery rose 0.4% after again rejecting a Paramount buyout approach and pointing shareholders toward a rival Netflix offer, while Paramount Skydance fell 1%, the Associated Press reported. 5
Oil steadied after two days of declines as traders weighed swelling U.S. fuel inventories and Venezuela developments. Brent was up at $60.02 a barrel and U.S. West Texas Intermediate held around $56.05; Morgan Stanley analysts forecast a surplus as large as 3 million barrels per day in the first half of 2026. Washington has also outlined a deal to gain access to up to $2 billion of Venezuelan crude and seized two Venezuela-linked oil tankers in the Atlantic, one under Russia’s flag. 6
In Asia, Samsung Electronics projected a three-fold jump in fourth-quarter operating profit to a record 20 trillion won ($13.82 billion), beating an LSEG SmartEstimate of 18 trillion won, as tight supply and an AI-driven demand surge pushed up prices for conventional memory chips. Contract prices for DRAM — a common type of memory used in servers, PCs and smartphones — rose 313% in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, TrendForce data showed; TrendForce expects another 55% to 60% rise this quarter. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called demand “really, really quite terrific,” while Samsung co-CEO TM Roh said some impact from higher memory prices was “inevitable.” 7
Bitcoin slid in European trading, falling 2.4% to $90,449.9 by 03:35 ET and dropping below $91,000 as geopolitical risk and the looming U.S. payrolls report constrained risk appetite. 8
