By William L. Watts, MarketWatch
FRANKFURT (MarketWatch) — U.S. stock index futures drifted in and out of positive territory on Friday, with investors keeping a wary eye on oil prices as European markets posted a mixed performance.
Futures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJH2 -0.08% slipped 12 points to 12,961. S&P 500 Index futures SPH2 -0.34% edged down 2 points to 1,371.50, while Nasdaq 100 futures NDH2 -0.27% bucked the selling with a slight gain.
Wall Street ended the first day of the new month on Thursday with gains. The S&P 500 Index SPX +0.62% ended February with its strongest two-month start since 1987.
“The market rebound in February was nearly as strong as January’s and, for those who entered last month skeptical that the position-related recovery could persist in the face of a seemingly fraught economic and financial context, comparably unexpected,” said Michael Gavin, strategist at Barclays Capital, in a note to clients.
The ongoing rise in risky asset prices has been accompanied by falls in other indicators of investor anxiety, including measures of equity and currency volatility and asset-price correlations, he noted.
“History also supports something that investors seem to feel in their bones, that the ‘complacency’ that seems to go along with low volatility frequently sets the market up for a subsequent downdraft, which tends to be substantially more abrupt than the grinding improvement in market conditions that precedes it,” Gavin said.
However, he added that it seems unlikely that an abrupt shift in market sentiment is “imminent.”
Nymex oil futures CLJ2 -0.81% declined 80 cents to trade at $108.04 a barrel in recent action. Oil prices temporarily jumped on Thursday after reports, which were subsequently denied, of a Saudi pipeline explosion.
Oil futures continue to trade near multi-month highs, feeling upward pressure amid ongoing tensions over Iran’s nuclear program.
Futures for April gold GCJ2 -0.33% eased $5.80 to $1,716.40 an ounce. The ICE dollar index DXY +0.64% , which measures the dollar against a basket of six major rivals, traded at 79.130 compared to 78.803 in late North American trading on Thursday.
Yelp Inc. late Thursday priced its initial public offering of 7.1 million shares at $15 a share last Thursday, coming in above its previously expected price range of $12 to $14 a share. Shares of the local business-reviews site are slated to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange on Friday morning under the ticker symbol “YELP.”
Zynga Inc. ZNGA +2.97% late Thursday said it would introduce a new platform to allow people to play Zynga games over the site without having to go through Facebook Inc. FB 0.00% or other social-network sites.
The U.S. economic calendar features no major data.
But on the earnings front, Big Lots BIG +0.58% before the opening bell reported a fourth-quarter profit of $114.7 million, or $1.75 a share, up from $110.1 million, or $1.46 a share a year earlier. Sales for the Columbus, Ohio-based wholesale retailer, which opened 23 new stores in the U.S., rose to $1.67 billion from $1.52 billion in the year-ago period. Analysts polled by FactSet Research were looking for a profit, on average, of $1.74 a share on sales of $1.62 billion.
Asian equities ended mostly higher. European equities were trading mixed, although financials continued to press higher after euro-zone banks grabbed more than a half-trillion euros in cheap loans earlier this week in the European Central Bank’s three-year long-term refinancing operation. Read Europe Markets.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA +0.22% closed the first trading day of the new month on Thursday with a 28.23 gain at 12,980.30. The S&P 500 rose 8.41 points Thursday to close at 1,374.09.
William L. Watts is MarketWatch's European bureau chief, based in Frankfurt.
