Before the bell: Dow futures jump 1.5% and gold tops $4,000 after Democrats sweep Congress

Wall Street's first read of a Democratic sweep was a sell-off, and its second was a rebound. Nasdaq 100 futures hit 27,615.75 overnight, their lowest since July 30, then recovered more than 900 points, CNBC reported. By 6:20 AM ET all three major index futures were roughly 1% to 1.5% above Tuesday afternoon, gold had climbed back above $4,000, and oil was lower.

Futures around 6:20 AM ET

Quotes from Yahoo Finance, read about 6:20 AM ET Wednesday. Changes are our arithmetic against each contract's price in the 5-minute bar ending about 3:55 PM ET Tuesday, so they can differ from feeds that measure against a settlement price. Oil is the active December WTI contract.

Who is moving on the election result

CNBC's live coverage says Democrats took both the House and Senate, and that President Trump told the Wall Street Journal he expects to work with them, which it said eased worries about a contested result. Andrew Slimmon of Morgan Stanley Investment Management told CNBC that markets "like gridlock," and that a push toward a Middle East settlement could lower oil. We covered the calls in our overnight update.

The premarket moves are sector-specific, as CNBC reported them:

• Renewables up: First Solar +8.5%, Plug Power +10.6%, Sunrun +8.6% on expectations of a policy shift on clean energy.
• Health insurers and hospitals up: Molina +6.3%, Centene +4.7% to +5%, HCA between +1.4% and +7.2% across CNBC's two updates.
• Musk companies down: CNBC had SpaceX and Tesla down about 4% to 5% premarket after Texas, where both are based, elected a Democratic governor. Musk spent at least $474 million on the midterms, CNBC reported.
• AI infrastructure mixed: CoreWeave fell about 3%, Oracle 1.3%, while Nvidia, Microsoft and Amazon were modestly higher. CNBC links the pressure on data-center names to Democratic support for data-center moratoriums, including in Texas.

The Texas point matters beyond one stock. CNBC cites Wells Fargo as saying 27% of planned U.S. data-center gigawatts sit in Texas, so a state-level policy fight there bears on how fast the AI buildout can proceed. That is a risk to timelines, not yet a policy change.

Rates and gold

The 10-year Treasury yield closed Tuesday at 4.95%, up from 4.91% Monday, with the 2-year at 4.61%, per Treasury data. CNBC reported yields lower overnight, with the 10-year around 4.92% and the 30-year about 5.29%. The Wall Street Journal's headline says Treasurys strengthened after the sweep.

Spot gold was up about 2.9% at $4,043 at 5:05 AM ET, CNBC said, with silver up 4.4% near $52. The Journal's headline ties the rally to a softer dollar and lower yields. That reverses the slide we covered earlier this week, when gold sat near its one-year closing low.

Company news

• AMD was up about 6% to 7% premarket after a quarter that beat estimates (see our report).
• Novo Nordisk raised its outlook for a second time this year. CNBC reports third-quarter sales of 79.2 billion Danish kroner ($11.9 billion), against a FactSet estimate of 73.6 billion, helped by Wegovy pill sales, and shares rose as much as 6% in early European trading. It now expects adjusted sales and operating profit growth of negative 2% to positive 2% at constant exchange rates.

On the calendar

Per the Nasdaq earnings calendar, McDonald's, Uber, CVS Health, Emerson Electric, Datadog and W.W. Grainger report before the open; Arm, Qualcomm, McKesson, MercadoLibre, AppLovin, MetLife and Allstate report after the close. For McDonald's, CNBC says analysts surveyed by LSEG expect earnings of $3.38 a share on $7.29 billion in revenue, with U.S. same-store sales seen falling 0.5% per StreetAccount; the stock is down about 11% over the past year. Chipotle executives said last week that restaurant traffic softened in October, so the fourth-quarter comments are the part to watch.

We could not confirm a full schedule of today's U.S. economic releases from a primary source, so check the BLS and EIA calendars. The October jobs report is due Friday, Nov. 6 at 8:30 AM ET, according to the BLS schedule. Headlines from Reuters, the Financial Times and Al Jazeera say Iran called Washington's reply to its Hormuz plan "unconvincing" and that Trump confirmed strikes; we read only the headlines, and oil has been trading on that diplomacy for days.

Sources: Yahoo Finance; U.S. Treasury; CNBC; Wall Street Journal; Reuters; Financial Times; Nasdaq; BLS; Chronicle reports. Futures are not cash-market closes and can move sharply before the open. This is market information, not investment advice.