Stock market news live updates: Stock futures open higher, extending gains after record-setting session - Yahoo Finance

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Stock futures opened higher Monday evening, building on advances following a record-setting day.

Contracts on the S&P 500 edged up. The blue-chip index set a record intraday high earlier on Monday, but ended just short of a record close. The Nasdaq outperformed and rallied 1.6% to new highs, led by gains in Big Tech stocks including Amazon (AMZN). "Reopening" stocks including the airlines and cruise lines also added to gains after rising during the regular trading day, with optimism over a broader leisure and travel recovery coming after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted full approval to Pfizer (PFE) and BioNTech's (BNTX) COVID-19 vaccine.

Investors are also eagerly awaiting the Federal Reserve's virtual Jackson Hole Symposium beginning on Thursday. The event is expected to serve as another forum for central bank officials to discuss their assessment of economic conditions, and offer hints as to when the Fed might announce and eventually begin the process of tapering its crisis-era asset purchase program.

New economic data out at the start of the week disappointed relative to Wall Street's estimates, with an index tracking activity in the U.S. services sector cooling to an eight-month low as concerns over the Delta variant started to weigh on demand.

Despite the ongoing risks around the virus, however, three major factors have served to help keep equity markets marching toward fresh all-time highs, according to one strategist.

"The first one, that's extremely low discount rates. The 10-year Treasury yield is barely off the August lows," Michael Darda, MKM Partners chief economist, told Yahoo Finance. "So all things equal, if interest rates are low, if discount rates are low, valuations will tend to be higher because of a lack of competition."

"In addition to that, we have a very high liquidity environment ... and earnings have been incredibly strong," he added. "Typically when long-term interest rates are falling, earnings or the economy is faltering. In this case, the earnings have been quite robust, really historic. So we're really going to need to see one of those three pillars disturbed in some fashion for a big decline in equity prices."

Others offered a similarly upbeat take on the trajectory for U.S. equities.

"We think the primary trend is higher," Keith Lerner, Truist Wealth chief market strategist, told Yahoo Finance. "You're only about one year into this economic expansion. Economic expansions last about five years. And the earnings season which we just got out of was phenomenal once again."

"Even if it's peak growth, we still think it's going to be strong growth," he said. "You have earnings moving forward, and then you look at the relative comparison of stocks relative to bonds and they're still attractive ... Overall we think the right position is to be overweight stocks."

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