DoorDash, AMC, Disney, Coinbase, Dogecoin: What to Watch When the Stock Market Opens as at Today

 Here’s what we’re watching ahead of Friday’s opening bell.

 U.S. stock futures rose, pointing to gains for major indexes at the end of a choppy week in which a jump in inflation rattled markets.

 Futures for the S&P 500 rose 0.6%. An advance after the opening bell is still likely to leave the broad market gauge in the red for this week, its worst since the end of February. Contracts for the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 0.4%. Futures on the technology-heavy Nasdaq-100 added 1.1%. Read our full market wrap here.

 U.S. retail spending was flat in April, the latest sign of an uneven recovery as the economy emerges from the pandemic.

What’s Coming Up

 U.S. business inventories for March, due at 10 a.m., are expected to rise 0.3% from a month earlier. The University of Michigan’s preliminary consumer sentiment index for May, also due at 10 a.m., is expected to rise to 90.1 from 88.3 at the end of April.

Market Movers to Watch

 AMC Entertainment shares rose 5.2% premarket, building on Thursday’s 24% surge. Reddit investors have been back at it, popularizing the hash tag #AMCSqueeze, and the company also managed to cash in on the rally by completing a share sale.

 Dogecoin rallied more than 30% to 52 cents apiece after cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Global said it would add the joke cryptocurrency to its trading offerings in the next six to eight weeks. Its rebound also followed a tweet from Tesla CEO Elon Musk saying he was working with dogecoin’s developers to improve transaction efficiency on the network.

 Coinbase shares added 5.4% premarket after the cryptocurrency exchange’s profit surged in the first quarter, driven by a manic rally in bitcoin and other digital assets.

 Disney slumped 4% premarket. The entertainment giant added 8.7 million Disney+ subscribers in its fiscal second quarter, but its parks segment logged an operating loss as the company faces an economy trying to emerge from the pandemic.

 Airbnb shares gained 1.4% premarket after the company reported more than $10 billion in bookings in the latest period, while revenue recovered from the March 2020 quarter.

Monitors displayed Coinbase signage during the company's IPO at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, April 14, 2021. 

Monitors displayed Coinbase signage during the company's IPO at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, April 14, 2021.

 DoorDash shares jumped 8.8% premarket. The food-delivery service’s loss for the three months through March narrowed but missed analysts’ estimates.

 Graphic Packaging shares climbed 2.4% premarket. The company is buying AR Packaging from CVC Funds for $1.45 billion in cash.

 Whole Earth Brands shares gained 2.4% premarket after the food company released its quarterly earnings report.

Market Facts

 On average, 2021 U.S.-listed IPOs, not including blank-check companies, are up 6.4% from their IPO prices through Wednesday’s close, according to the latest data available from Dealogic.

 Turnover for shares of furniture company Ethan Allen Interiors in the past month is 56% above its five-year average. Its ticker symbol, ETH, is the same as the one used for red-hot cryptocurrency ethereum, leading some investors to confuse them.

 On this day in 1997, Amazon.com went public on the Nasdaq, offering 3 million shares at an initial price of $18 per share.

Chart of the Day

 Top U.S. cannabis growers will be glad to see the back of one particular high: double-digit interest rates. Others in the pot industry may feel a bit deflated, writes Heard on the Street columnist Carol Ryan.