Derren Nathan, head of equity research at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: “US stock futures have fallen this morning after a mixed performance by the major indices on Wednesday.
“The tech-heavy NASDAQ managed to keep its head above water as Oracle’s results provided further evidence of surging demand for computing power, sending the stock up nine per cent with US-listed semiconductor names broadly in the green.
“Shares in Uber were up as the ride-hailing pioneer announced a strategic partnership with Amazon-backed robotaxi developer Zoox.
“Passengers could be taking a trip down the Las Vegas strip as soon as this summer.
“Uber’s doing the right thing by attempting to future-proof its business, but there are some big questions around the ability of Zoox to scale.
“The same can’t be said of Tesla however, and it’s Elon Musk’s route to market that’s likely to drive the future of autonomous taxis.
“The US Consumer Price Index read out for February was thankfully uneventful, with price rises unchanged at 2.4 per cent, bang in line with economists’ forecasts.
“In quieter times, that would be taken as a positive, but these figures haven’t captured the recent spike in energy prices.
“While the numbers do point to a picture of underlying price stability, interest rate expectations are likely to be dominated by geopolitical events for a while yet.
“While the likely timing of further reductions in borrowing costs has been pushed out a few months markets are still expecting at least one rate cut by the Fed this year.”
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