Stock market news live updates: Stock futures open slightly higher - Yahoo Finance

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Stock futures opened slightly higher Tuesday evening after sliding during the regular session, as investors weighed optimism over widespread post-pandemic business reopenings against concerns over economic overheating.

Contracts on the S&P 500 ticked up. Nasdaq futures edged higher after the index closed lower by 1.7% earlier, with technology stocks lagging amid a rotation to cyclical shares poised to benefit from easing stay-in-place orders. Airlines, cruse lines and hotel stocks increased on Tuesday, and held onto gains during the overnight session.

Elsewhere, shares of online mortgage provider Rocket Companies (RKT) pulled back in late trading. The stock surged 71% to a record high earlier in the day and triggered a volatility halt after investors on Reddit appeared to target the heavily shorted stock as another short-squeeze candidate.

Investors this week have fixed their gaze on the next several months, when vaccine-enabled reopenings will help boost service-centric companies heavily beaten down last year. President Joe Biden said Tuesday that the U.S. now expects to have enough COVID-19 vaccines for all adults who want one by the end of May, pulling forward that target by two full months from the government's previous forecast. The drugmaker Merck (MRK) is set to help produce Johnson & Johnson's (JNJ) single-dose COVID-19 vaccine that was authorized over this past weekend, which would help speed the pace of inoculations in the U.S.

Plus, the U.S. Senate is debating the contours of another stimulus package worth up to $1.9 trillion this week, with congressional lawmakers racing to pass another relief bill before a mid-March cliff for federal unemployment benefits authorized under the last package.

At the same time, the likelihood of increased government spending alongside widespread business reopenings has raised the specter of both speedy growth in the U.S. economy, but also rising inflationary pressures. And last week's jump in Treasury yields – with the benchmark 10-year yield reaching a one-year high of 1.61% – remains fresh in the minds of investors, who have been eyeing the rise in interest rates as a possible hindrance to the recovery and deviation from last year's ultra-low borrowing costs backdrop.

"One of the fundamental underpinnings of strong equity performance the last six to nine months has been very low yields. And yields are not as low today as they were just a few weeks ago," Eric Winograd AllianceBernstein senior economist, told Yahoo Finance. "When we think about how that yield move will play out, the bond market takes a staircase up. You get sharp moves up and then a period when it moves sideways and consolidates, and then another sharp move higher. So I think we should expect that basic pattern to repeat a handful of additional times over the course of the next few quarters."

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