Wall Street gains as investors eye US trade talks with China, Fed rate decision and earnings reports

Wall Street chugged mostly higher in premarket trading Tuesday as Chinese and U.S. officials begin a second day of trade talks and the Federal Reserve kicks off its two-day meeting to make a decision on interest rate policy. The meetings come amid one of the busiest weeks of corporate earnings season and a flurry of economic data.

Futures for the S&P 500 were up 0.2%, while futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average edged 0.1% higher. Nasdaq futures rose 0.4% before the bell.

Analysts said investors were watching for the latest from President Donald Trump and U.S. trade talks with China in Stockholm. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng were meeting in the Swedish capital.

“Aside from addressing economic imbalances, tariffs are also now well entrenched in the geopolitical arena,” Tan Boon Heng of the Asia & Oceania Treasury Department at Mizuho Bank said in a commentary.

With regard to the Fed meeting, the widespread expectation on Wall Street is that officials at the U.S. central bank will wait until September to resume cutting interest rates, though a couple of Trump’s appointees could dissent in the vote. The Fed has been on hold with interest rates this year since cutting them several times at the end of 2024.

Trump has publicly chastised Fed Chair Jerome Powell for not cutting the benchmark lending rate, which Powell says is due to the uncertain ramifications of Trump's trade war, most notably whether those policies will trigger higher inflation.

In corporate news, UnitedHealth Group shares slid 4% after the company badly missed Wall Street’s second-quarter earnings expectations and disappointed investors with its updated profit forecast.

The health care giant said Tuesday that it expects rising medical costs to continue to pressure its performance and forecast adjusted earnings of at least $16 per share in 2025. The company had started 2025 with an initial forecast for adjusted earnings of up to $30 per share.

Union Pacific rose 1.2% in premarket after it offered up details on its bid to merge with Norfolk Southern that would create the U.S.'s first transcontinental railroad.

Union Pacific is offering $20 billion cash and one share of its stock to buy Norfolk Southern, the companies said Tuesday, adding that the merger would streamline deliveries of all kinds of raw materials and goods.

Norfolk Southern shares fell 3%.

Novo Nordisk, which makes the weight loss drug Wegovy, plunged 24% in premarket trading after the company cut its sales and operating profit for the year.

Also reporting earnings Tuesday are Boeing and Starbucks.

Hundreds of U.S. companies are lined up to report how much profit they made during the spring, with nearly a third of the businesses in the S&P 500 index scheduled to deliver updates this week.

The government will also be busy this week, releasing three separate sets of data on the labor market, punctuated with the July jobs report on Friday. The first second-quarter GDP estimate come on Wednesday, followed by the Fed's preferred measure of inflation on Thursday.

Elsewhere, in Europe at midday, France's CAC 40 jumped 1.3% in early trading, while the German DAX rose 1.1%. Britain's FTSE 100 added 0.5%.

Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 fell 0.8% to 40,674.55 on broad selling of major companies including automakers and big banks. Toyota Motor Corp. dipped 2.3% and Honda Motor Co. fell 2.1%. Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group finished 1.8% lower, while Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group stock dipped 1.6%.

Hong Kong's Hang Seng dropped 0.2% to 25,524.45, while the Shanghai Composite gained 0.3% to 3,609.71.

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 edged 0.1% higher to 8,704.60.

South Korea’s Kospi gained 0.7% to 3,230.57. Samsung Electronics edged 0.3% higher after jumping nearly 7% on Monday on news that it signed a deal with Tesla to provide computer chips for its electric vehicles.

In energy trading, benchmark U.S. crude was unchanged at $66.71 a barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, gained 5 cents to $69.37 a barrel.

In currency trading, the U.S. dollar rose to 148.66 Japanese yen from 148.56 yen. The euro cost $1.1547, down from $1.1589.