U.S. Stock Futures Jump With Lift From Boeing, Gilead and Apple

(Bloomberg) -- Tentative steps toward progress in the economy and the fight against the coronavirus helped push U.S. stock futures higher.

Contracts on the S&P 500 climbed 3.3% as of 6:37 a.m. in London. Shares of Boeing Co. surged 8.8% in afterhours trading after saying it will resume commercial plane production at a plant near Seattle next week. Gilead Sciences Inc. jumped 16% on a report describing anecdotal evidence of shortened hospitalizations in Covid-19 patients being treated in Chicago with the company’s experimental drug remdesivir.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average saw its futures rise 3.7%, while contracts on the Nasdaq 100, which earlier erased its loss for 2020, rallied 2.4%. President Donald Trump unveiled guidelines on reopening the U.S. economy that could allow states and employers to abandon within four weeks most social distancing practices to curb the outbreak.

Investors are on high alert for good news on the coronavirus and while it’s impossible to tell how significant Gilead’s is, markets will still try to price it in, said Peter Mallouk, president and chief investment officer of Creative Planning, which manages $45 billion.

“For the market to move higher in a sustained way, it needs to see a path to this being behind us,” Mallouk said “The only thing that’s going to give us that if somehow this runs its course, there’s a treatment that significantly improves the mortality rate, or there’s a vaccine on the horizon.”

Apple joined the late rally. The second-biggest company behind Microsoft, rose 3% after hours after Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook expressed confidence the company will emerge strongly from the crisis. Microsoft and Facebook also advanced.

Should they hold, the gains would extend the U.S. stock market’s remarkable rally from its March lows, an advance that pushed the Nasdaq 100 into positive territory for the year earlier Thursday. Exchange-mandated trading limits will prevent further gains if the S&P 500 rises 5% to 2,929.

The vast majority of the rebound has come in American megacap companies, particularly in the technology industry. Gauges like the Russell 2000 and the S&P Midcap 400 remain down more than 25% on the year and an equal-weighted version of the S&P 500 is sitting on a 22% decline.

Stocks were whipsawed during the session after a fresh batch of weak economic data and poor corporate results. Federal Reserve officials offered a pessimistic view on the outlook for the U.S. economy, cautioning that a recovery will be slow to take hold once social-distancing measures are rolled back.

“It may take a while, and I mean into 2021, for the consumer to get his or her footing back,” Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan said Thursday in a Bloomberg TV interview with David Westin.

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