Newsquawk Logo

US Pre-Market Movers: SOXX, MSFT, BABA, FUN, KBH, GIS, MPC, GEHC, IMVT, PAYX, CTAS

Pre-market movers sheets of this kind are a digest, not a signal; the tradable content is the clustering, and here the tape splits cleanly into three distinct mechanisms.

Newsquawk StaffPublished On the live feed at — 7 more headlines followed before this page went public
Newsquawk headlinesUTC

US BROKER MOVES: MSFT upgraded at Sitfel; ALV downgraded at Wolfe Research

Norway's Industry and Commerce Minister says Norway plans to to mine Europe's largest rare earth deposit by 2028, AFP reports

US Pre-Market Movers: SOXX, MSFT, BABA, FUN, KBH, GIS, MPC, GEHC, IMVT, PAYX, CTAS

[PREVIEW] SNB Policy Announcement on 24th September 2026

Cintas (CTAS) Q1 2026 (USD): EPS 1.36 (exp. 1.35), Revenue 3.01bln (exp. 2.98bln)

Open the platform and use it. The whole workspace is free to try, with no signup and no card. When you want the headlines arriving live instead of on a delay, Newsquawk Pro is £24.99 for 7 days.

Try the platform free
Free. No signup, no card.

Futures: ES -0.1%, NQ -0.3%, RTY -0.6%

  • Chips (INTC, AMD, ARM) - All lower in pre-market, adding to downside from late session Tuesday after OpenAI announced Astra 6 - all three were beneficiaries of Meta's Muse. SOXX -1.5% in pre-market trade.
  • Microsoft (MSFT) +0.9%: Plans to increase Copilot discounts as it launches an AI “super app”, according to The Information. Meanwhile, MSFT upgrade at Stifel.
  • Alibaba (BABA) -3.6%: Chinese AI stocks fell after a report that regulators opened a data security probe into DeepSeek and Moonshot AI
  • Cedar Fair (FUN) +1.5%: Activist investor Jana Partners is urging Six Flags Entertainment to hire banks and explore a sale, according to WSJ.
  • KB Home (KBH) -3.3%: Reported weaker housing demand, lower deliveries and orders, and softer housing conditions, which outweighed an earnings beat.
  • General Mills (GIS) -0.9%: Inflation concerns offsetting earnings beat.
  • Refiners (MPC)+2%: Marathon Petroleum paring some of the losses seen on Tuesday after Trump said he is considering a diesel export ban. WSJ reports that Trump's support for the ban of diesel exports was seen to "blindside" industry officials.
  • GE Health Care (GEHC) +1.2%: Raised its quarterly dividend +14% to USD 0.04/shr.
  • Immunovant (IMVT) -6%: Study of IMVT-1402 in cutaneous Lupus Erythematosus. Did not achieve statistical significance on the primary endpoint.
  • Paychex (PAYX) -5%: Stock slides despite EPS and revenue beat.
  • Cintas (CTAS) -2%: Stock also slides despite top and bottom line betat whil the co. also raised guidance in line with forecasts.
Context

First, the semiconductor complex is re-pricing a competitive narrative shift, with a single AI model announcement moving an entire peer set that had traded as a bloc on the prior catalyst; episodes of this kind, where positioning was built around one beneficiary story, tend to see follow-through in the same direction until the basket re-finds relative value, and SOXX serves as the cleanest proxy for whether the unwind extends. Second, the earnings cohort is displaying the classic asymmetry where in-line beats are sold and guidance nuance outweighs the headline print: homebuilders, payroll processors and business services names falling on beats is a pattern historically associated with markets pricing forward demand rather than backward results, and the homebuilder read-across to housing data is the established transmission. Third, the policy-sensitive names, refiners on an export-ban proposal and Chinese AI on a regulatory probe, are headline-driven in the literal sense; such moves have tended to partially retrace when the proposal proves early-stage or blindsides even its supposed beneficiaries, as the refining case reportedly has. The activist approach on the amusement park operator follows the usual sequence of initial pop, then spread behaviour contingent on whether banks are actually retained. Worth noting is that index futures are only modestly lower against idiosyncratic weakness, consistent with rotation rather than broad risk-off.

Related headlines

The whole workspace, free to try.

Try it free
Newsquawk Logo

© 2026 Newsquawk. All rights reserved.