U.S. stock futures on Wednesday were steady to higher, with glum results out of media giants Walt Disney and Time Warner and a profit warning from Costco Wholesale limiting carry-over from the previous session's rise.
S&P 500 futures rose 3.3 points to 834.30 while Nasdaq 100 futures added 2.5 points to 1,210.20. Dow industrial futures rose 6 points.
"It is still all about treading water this week, surviving the news and making it to Friday. Today should lean back toward the bears," said Marc Pado, a strategist for Cantor Fitzgerald.
ADP on Wednesday estimated that 522,000 private-sector jobs were lost in January. The report comes two days ahead of the government report.
Services sentiment data for January is due at 10 a.m.
Despite the strength in equities, other assets pointed to diminishing risk appetite.
The Japanese yen beat up on rivals on Wednesday, notably the Australian dollar but also the U.S. dollar. Australian opposition lawmakers opposed a stimulus package there. Meanwhile, the dollar climbed against the euro after Russia's credit rating was downgraded by Fitch.
Oil futures held over $41 a barrel ahead of weekly energy inventories, and gold futures traded around the $900 an ounce mark.
"The big risk to the highly interventionalist world we live in is that the market takes fright at the eventual sums needed to keep us from the edge of depression and we see a huge sell-off in government bond markets," said credit analysts from Deutsche Bank. "Even if this risk is small, the probabilities edge higher with every week of new fiscal and monetary promises."
Earnings were mostly of the gloomy variety.
Dow industrials component Kraft Foods fell 9% as the food maker reported a 72% profit fall and cut its 2009 earnings outlook.
Fellow Dow component Walt Disney fell 8% in pre-open trade after the company reported a 32% profit fall on lower DVD sales and a drop in advertising sales at its broadcast and cable television networks.
Time Warner reported a $16 billion loss for the fourth quarter after write-offs and said this year's earnings would be around flat compared to 2008 levels. Time Warner shares fell 1.6% in pre-market trade.
Costco Wholesale fell 7% as it warned its fiscal second-quarter earnings would be substantially below analyst estimates and said it won't provide new estimates for the rest of the year.
Alcatel-Lucent reported a $5 billion fourth-quarter loss as the French-American telecom equipment maker continued its ignominious trend of never being profitable. Still, the stock rose in Paris as operating profit was better than forecast.
Panasonic warned of an annual loss of $4.2 billion and said it would cut 15,000 jobs.
After the close, tech bellwether Cisco Systems ) is due to report quarterly results.
Outside of earnings, Ticketmaster and Live Nation will be in the spotlight on a report in The Wall Street Journal that the ticketing firms are weighing a merger.
Overseas, the Nikkei 225 climbed 2.7% in Tokyo, helped by automakers, and the FTSE 100 rose 0.5% in London, led by mining stocks.
Solid results from Merck and Schering-Plough and an unexpected rise in pending home sales lifted stocks on Tuesday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 141 points, the S&P 500 added 13 points and the Nasdaq Composite added 21 points.
