Factory orders, job openings, Walmart meeting: 3 things to watch

By Liz Moyer

Investing.com -- Stocks were mixed on Monday to start the first trading day of the second quarter after a surprise cut in oil production by global producers set off inflation fears.

Futures traders, who had been betting more heavily on a pause in the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes at the May meeting, are now shifting their bets to another increase of a quarter of a percentage point instead. The Fed has been battling inflation but was considered ready to ease up on its effort after March's banking turmoil until the oil-producing cartel announced its surprise cuts on Sunday.

Later this week, the jobs report for March will become another data point for the Fed to consider, though the job market has been holding up despite constant news of layoffs and cost-cutting coming out of the tech sector.

Another thing the Fed will be watching over the coming weeks is corporate earnings, which kick off with the big banks mid-April. Investors will be listening to whether the CEOs of the banks have shifted their views, given the expected credit crunch after last month's bank failures and the pullback in risk-taking.

Here are three things that could affect markets tomorrow:

1. Factory orders

The data on factory orders for February are due out at 10:00 ET (14:00 GMT). Analysts are expecting it to fall 0.5% for the month as the economy softened in the second month of the year.

2. Job openings

The JOLTs job openings report for February comes out at 10:00 ET also. Analysts expect to see 10.4 million job openings as of the end of February, a drop from the month before and down from the peak of 12M last year.

3. Walmart meeting

Walmart Inc. (NYSE:WMT) kicks off a two-day meeting for investors and analysts, including a live webcast for the public set to begin at 08:00 ET on Wednesday.