By Joe Woelfel
Stock futures declined Friday after the U.S. added far more jobs than expected in December. Employers added 256,000 jobs to nonfarm payrolls last month while economists anticipated 153,000.
U.S. stock markets were closed Thursday in honor of former President Jimmy Carter, who died Dec. 29, at age 100.
These stocks were poised to make moves Friday:
Nvidia was down 2.9% following a Bloomberg report that said the Biden administration plans to impose a final round of chip export restrictions before leaving office. The plan would see U.S. allies given free rein to import chips but block imports by unfriendly countries such as China and Russia, according to Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the matter. Fellow chip makers also fell. Broadcom fell 2%, and Advanced Micro Devices was down 2.8%. AMD was downgraded to Neutral from Buy at Goldman Sachs.
Shares of Micron Technology fell 1.4%. Coming into Friday, the memory and storage company has risen 18% this year, making it the top stock in the S&P 500.
Edison International has been the index's worst stock in 2025, down 13%. Making up most of that decline was the power producer's drop of 10% on Wednesday after the company's Southern California Edison subsidiary began shutting off power to some customers in California in an effort to help curb the multiple fires in Los Angeles. Edison said it doesn't serve the Palisades area, where one of the largest fires occurred. But it does have some infrastructure around the sites of the Hurst and Eaton fires and has been reviewing the incidents. The stock was down 0.6%.
Allstate, Travelers, and Chubb likely will be the publicly traded insurers most exposed to losses from the L.A. fires, according to analysts at J.P. Morgan, who estimated economic losses from the fires at about $50 billion, with insured losses estimated at $20 billion or more. Allstate was down 5%, Travelers fell 3.9%, and Chubb declined 5%.
Constellation Energy jumped 12% after reaching a deal to acquire privately held Calpine for $26.6 billion, including the assumption of debt. The acquisition creates the nation's largest clean energy provider.
Rigetti Computing was down 2.4%, D-Wave Quantum fell 3.6%, and IonQ slipped 0.7% following sharp losses for the quantum-computing stocks earlier in the week. The shares tumbled after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said "very useful quantum computers" were decades away. Alan Baratz, CEO of D-Wave Quantum, however told CNBC on Wednesday that his company's services were being used by clients such as Mastercard "not 30 years from now, today."
Delta Air Lines rose 8.3% after the carrier's fourth-quarter adjusted earnings of $1.85 a share beat analysts' estimates of $1.76 and the company said it expects a strong 2025.
Walgreens Boots Alliance jumped 17% after the drugstore chain reported fiscal first-quarter adjusted earnings of 51 cents a share, beating Wall Street estimates of 38 cents, and sales of $39.5 billion that topped forecasts of $37.4 billion. The company also maintained its fiscal 2025 outlook.
Write to Joe Woelfel at joseph.woelfel@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 10, 2025 08:41 ET (13:41 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
