Futures decline on Amazon and Merrill
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By Caroline ValetkevitchNEW YORK (Reuters) - Stock futures fell on Wednesday as Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc reported its first quarterly net loss in nearly six years and as earnings by Amazon.com Inc disappointed some investors.The world's largest brokerage reported write-downs of $7.9 billion from leveraged loans from corporate takeovers and bad bets on mortgage securities. It had a net loss of $2.3 billion.Merrill's shares fell 1.1 percent to $66.40 before the open."I don't think the Merrill's number going to do too much even, though it's a significantly larger write-off...This is a sector that has been reporting some pretty poor numbers, so this isn't too big of a surprise," said Owen Fitzpatrick, head of U.S. Equity Group at Deutsche Bank Private Wealth Management, in New York.S&P 500 futures were down 8.10 points and below fair value, a mathematical formula that evaluates pricing by taking into account interest rates, dividends and time to expiration on the contract.Dow Jones industrial average futures declined 46 points, and Nasdaq 100 futures fell 12.50 points.Earlier, newspapers reported that Merrill Lynch's third-quarter bond-related write-downs could be $2 billion or more in addition to Merrill's earlier forecast of write-downs of $5 billion.Amazon shares tumbled by 10 percent in after-hours trading on Tuesday after reporting results, erasing gains in anticipation of higher-than-expected results.The online retailer's profit quadrupled from the year before, but earnings per share only just beat the average Wall Street estimate and merely matched or, in some cases, fell short of some individual analysts' forecasts.Data on housing due at 10 a.m. will be watched for signs of further weakness. The National Association of Realtors report on existing-home sales for September is expected to come in at 5.25 million units at an annual rate, down from 5.5 million in August, according to a Reuters poll of economists.
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