Following a strong increase in stocks earlier in the day, US stock futures increased Monday night as investors mostly ignored geopolitical worries related to Venezuela in favor of possible economic gains for US businesses.
Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average (YM=F), S&P 500 (ES=F), and Nasdaq 100 (NQ=F) all saw slight increases of 0.1%.
The robust regular-session performance that drove the Dow (^DJI) to a record closing was followed by the subdued futures action.
The Dow increased by around 600 points, or roughly 1.2%, during Monday's session. The Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) increased by around 0.7%, driven by advances in large-cap growth names like Tesla (TSLA) and Amazon (AMZN), while the S&P 500 (^GSPC) increased by about 0.6%.
The changes seemed to be interpreted by markets as a possible stimulant for US business opportunity, especially in the energy and defense sectors, rather than as a cause of global instability. As the new year begins, the response demonstrated investors' ongoing willingness to take risks.
Following the White House's confirmation that the Trump administration has had talks concerning Venezuela's energy sector with several US oil companies, energy stocks surged despite the lack of specifics.
The only significant US oil company presently doing business in Venezuela, Chevron (CVX), saw a 5.1% increase. Additionally, Exxon Mobil (XOM) and Halliburton (HAL) saw increases of 2.2% and 7.8%, respectively, with after-hours advances of 0.2% and 0.4%.
AI businesses are expected to draw investors' attention with the CES, the premier innovation expo in Las Vegas, while stocks generally have better beginnings to the year.
Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia (NVDA), gave the opening remarks. Before the event concludes later this week, talks from AMD (AMD), Intel (INTC), and Qualcomm (QCOM) are scheduled.
A more circumspect undercurrent was evident in commodities. As some investors sought safety from volatility, gold (GC=F) futures saw their biggest daily increase since October.
After breaking past $13,000 per ton for the first time, copper (HG=F) continued its strong advance as bullish traders and investors were ignited by a renewed rush to ship metal to the US.
After rising more than 4% on Monday, benchmark prices on the London Metal Exchange jumped as much as 1.5% to a record $13,187 a ton. Since mid-November, the metal has now gained more than 20%.
Due to President Donald Trump's continual threat of import taxes, US copper prices are consistently higher than those on the LME, which has led to a rush to send metal to the US.
This has sparked concerns that the rest of the globe would run out of copper and encouraged optimistic investors who are already drawn to the metal because of its use in everything from data centers to batteries for electric vehicles.
The next-generation Vera Rubin superchip will be unveiled at CES 2026 on Monday in Las Vegas, according to AI giant Nvidia (NVDA). One Vera CPU and two Rubin GPUs are combined into one processor in Vera Rubin, one of six chips that make up what Nvidia is now referring to as its Rubin platform.
According to Nvidia, the Rubin platform is perfect for advanced reasoning models, agentic AI, and mixture-of-experts (MoE) models, which combine a number of "expert" AIs and direct inquiries to the right one based on the user's query.
According to a statement from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, "Rubin arrives at exactly the right moment, as AI computing demand for both training and inference is going through the roof."
"Rubin takes a huge step toward the next frontier of AI with our annual cadence of delivering a new generation of AI supercomputers and extreme codesign across six new chips."
