More earnings, more health care—What you need to know in markets on Wednesday

This week is all about earnings and the ongoing health care debate in Washington, D.C. That story continues on Wednesday.

Headlining the earnings calendar will again be financial stocks, with Morgan Stanley (MS) and American Express (AXP) set to report results. Qualcomm (QCOM) and Reynolds American (RAI) will also be among the highlights.

On Tuesday, the biggest loser in the Dow was Goldman Sachs (GS), which reported a sharp drop in trading revenue at the firm, which is the investment bank’s bread-and-butter segment.

As Business Insider noted on Tuesday, Goldman CFO Marty Chavez said on its earnings call, “It was a difficult quarter on all fronts … We didn’t navigate the market as well as we aspire to or as well as we have in the past.”

Expect investors to focus on this area of Morgan Stanley’s business on Wednesday.

Also in earnings news on Tuesday, Netflix (NFLX) shares surged 13% to a fresh high after reporting better-than-expected results Monday after the market close. This rally powered the tech-heavy Nasdaq to a record high while the S&P 500 also touched a new high.

Of the major U.S. averages, only the Dow finished in the red, dragged lower by Goldman Sachs.

Health care, don’t care

On Monday night into Tuesday, the Senate Republican plans for a new health care bill fell apart. Markets did little to react to this news. Which, at this point, is to be expected.

We’ve written time and again how markets have moved on from any “Trump trades” which were specific bets on policies that may have come out of the new administration following Donald Trump’s win in the presidential election.

On Tuesday, the U.S. dollar, perhaps the lone holdout among assets that moved in anticipation of some Trump policy, was down against all major currency pairs.

There are no “Trump trades” left.

President Donald Trump

But Wall Street strategists are still looking to Washington, D.C. for some sense of what might be coming next as we seek the ever-elusive concept of certainty that markets are purported to love.

Michael Wilson, equity strategist at Morgan Stanley, wrote this week that while almost all of the S&P 500’s roughly 15% rally since the election has been due to multiple expansion—that is, investors willing to pay more for one dollar of earnings—further expansion will be needed for the index to hit the firm’s 2,700 target. The S&P 500 closed at 2,460 on Tuesday.

“We acknowledge that in order for the S&P 500 to reach our 2,700 target, we will need to see equity multiples expand again later this year and approach our 19x forward 12 month earnings forecast,” Wilson writes.