Welcome to a new week.
Here are the four things you need to know before the opening bell rings in New York:
1. Market overview: It looks like we could have a positive start to the week.
U.S. stock futures are holding steady and the U.S. dollar is rising a tad versus most global currencies.
International stock markets are climbing, after starting the day in negative territory.
Crude oil futures have slipped to trade around $36.50 per barrel. Oil prices dropped sharply at the start of the year and hit a low around $26 per barrel, but have since rebounded.
2. Stocks to watch — Alaska Air, Tesla: Alaska Air Group appears set to pay more than $2 billion to acquire Virgin America, outbidding JetBlue for the carrier.
The Wall Street Journal reports that the deal could be announced Monday.
Tesla continues to be in the spotlight Monday after the company unveiled its highly anticipated Model 3 car last week. Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted on Sunday that the company had received 276,000 orders for the new car. If all those orders go through, that’s worth roughly $11 billion to the company. However, production is only expected to begin in late 2017.
3.Telecom turmoil: Shares in French telecom giants are getting pummeled Monday after a potential merger between two major players was called off.
Orange and Bouygues Telecom said on Friday that they decided to call off negotiations about a potential tie-up.
Investors had been hoping that a merger would ease price wars between the four main competitors in the French market.
Shares in Orange are down by about 5% while Bouygues shares are off by about 14%.
Iliad and Numericable-SFR, the market’s other two major players, were also down by more than 10%.
4. Weekly market recap: U.S. stock market indexes all made big gains last week.
The Dow Jones industrial average rose 1.6%, the S&P 500 climbed 1.8% and the Nasdaq surged 3%.
