FTSE and Europe's markets fall and S&P 500 heads past 5,000 on earnings tailwinds

Head over to the Yahoo Finance US site for mroe market moving news. Happy Friday

Here's IG analysts' take on what might be to come next week:

We've had some commentary come in on the near-record highs the S&P 500 is flirting with. Here's what Adam Turnquist, chief technical strategist for LPL Financial thinks:

• A close above this closely watched level will undoubtedly create headlines and further feed fear of missing out (FOMO) emotions. Outside of a potential sentiment boost, round numbers such as 5,000 often provide a psychological area of support or resistance for the market. Researchers often refer to them as ‘cognitive shortcuts’ that create a round-number bias.

• Performance for the S&P 500 has been positive after reaching a major milestone. Of the last nine, the index posted a 12-month average return of 10.4% after clearing each milestone, with 78% of occurrences producing positive results.

• If the market does surpass 5,000, history suggests it may take a few tries to hold above this level. There have only been two milestones that were not subsequently breached after being crossed.

Meanwhile the FTSE has gone into negative territory. Here are today's stock fallers:

And the stocks propping it up:

As we mentioned in our piece earlier outlining today's trending tickers, Pinterest and Cloudflare are interesting stocks to watch today in the US.

Cloudflare is so far up almost 25% in early trade in the US today. The moves come after revenue came in at $362.5m for the quarter, an increase of 32% year-over-year. Full-year 2023 revenue was $1.3bn. The company also released forecasts for its first quarter revenue at $372.5-$373.5m, beating Wall Street expectations.

Meanwhile, Pinterest saw its revenue for the fourth quarter come in at $981m with 12% year-on-year growth. Monthly active users jumped to 498 million with 11% year-on-year growth.

Following the results, the stock was trading almost 28% lower due to revenue sailing below expectations, but picked up after news of a partnership deal with Google announced on the company's earnings call. CEO Bill Ready told analysts the company had begun to roll out a new ad integration which will focus on monetising "under-monetised" markets.

"We went live a couple of weeks ago, and this is starting to ramp up. Third-party ad demand is scaling as we anticipated," said Ready.

It's down almost 11% in early trade.

There's been a small revision to US inflation data, detailed by LiveSquawk here:

Oil prices are starting the day on a calmer note, after jumping more than 2% on Thursday due to continued tensions in the Middle East.

The potted summary is that the US killed the commander of an Iran-backed militia and Israel rejected a Hamas ceasefire proposal, indicating no clear end date to the conflict in the region.

Brent crude (BZ=F) is trading at $81.61 a barrel right now, and crude (CL=F) is up 0.1% to trade at $76.33.

Cocoa futures have soared this week, spelling trouble for chocolate lovers. Here's Neil Wilson from Finalto on the jump:

"Cocoa prices hit fresh record highs on poor weather driving a decline in West African crop yields. Last year we discussed heavy rain in West Africa accelerating the spread of black pod disease, which causes cocoa pods to turn black and rot. Cocoa Swollen Shoot Virus in the Ivory Coast has also hit production. And whilst higher prices have tended to encourage more planting, EU rules make this harder today than in the past. Now it looks like the El Nino effect is starting to worry traders about the 2024 crop too."

Reuters has an exclusive interview with one of the Bank of England's more cautious monetary policy committee members this morning, suggesting there hasn't yet been enough evidence of cooling inflation to know that rate cuts are a good idea for the economy.

Jonathan Haskel was one of two MPC members who, last week, voted to raise the interest rate from 5.25% to 5.5%. Six members voted to hold and one voted to cut.

"I'm not going to apologise for banging on about persistence because I think we're right to," he told the news service, adding that the fall in inflation so far from 11.1% to 4% did not necessarily mean the future will be a low-inflation environment.

"The signs that we've seen thus far are encouraging. I don't think we've seen quite enough signs yet," Haskel said. "But if we accumulate more evidence on persistence, then by the very logic I've just set out, I'd be happy to change my vote."

US markets made small moves higher on Thursday with the S&P 500 (^GSPC) briefly reaching a record high of 5,000 in intraday trading, before closing back down at 4,997 points.

The Nasdaq (^IXIC), meanwhile, rose 0.2% and the Dow (^DJI) was up 0.1%, also touching record highs.

The small-cap Russell 2000 Index (^RUT) was an outperfomer on Thursday, rising almost 1.5% after having been a laggard during this year's market rally that has continued many of the themes that predominated in 2023.

Stocks have rallied as robust economic data and upbeat earnings have lifted spirits on Wall Street. But some investors are questioning whether gains can be sustained, given the concentrated group of megacaps driving them.

Chinese stocks were mixed and the Nikkei (^N225) made muted moves higher in Asian trading hours on Friday after inflation figures from China sewed uncertainty, even after signals of support for the market from Beijing earlier in the week.

The new data showed consumer prices in China have fallen at a faster clip year-on-year in January, down by 0.8% after falling 0.3% in December.

The Hang Seng (^HSI) fell 0.8% in Hong Kong while the SSE Composite (000001.SS) closed 1.3% higher.

Good morning from London. The FTSE 100 is feeling brighter than the weather, trading up around 0.1% before markets open in London. We also have more signals out of the Bank of England about its rate path.

Without further ado, let's get to it.