US stock futures pointed in mixed directions on Tuesday morning as traders largely stayed on the sidelines, holding off on big moves ahead of a heavy slate of Big Tech earnings and the Federal Reserve's interest rate decision.

Contracts tied to the Nasdaq-100 slipped 0.3%. Futures linked to the Dow Jones Industrial Average hovered just above the flatline, while S&P 500 futures drifted modestly lower following Monday's gains. The muted start reflected caution in a week packed with market-moving events.

Earnings Roundup

The early results offer a first read on the quarter, and the premarket swings show how sharply stocks move when numbers surprise in either direction.

Celestica led premarket gainers, with shares surging 16% after the electronics manufacturer posted strong third-quarter results and lifted its full-year outlook, pointing to booming demand for artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Whirlpool moved in the opposite direction, plunging 8.8% after the household appliance maker posted a surprise quarterly loss and cut its full-year guidance. The company continues to grapple with declining sales and shrinking margins.

Nucor advanced 1.4% in premarket trading after the steel producer reported a jump in third-quarter profit, with earnings from its steel mills segment more than doubling from a year earlier.

Novartis shares climbed 1.3% even as the Swiss drugmaker reported a drop in third-quarter net profit. The company nonetheless raised its full-year guidance despite some recent setbacks in clinical trials.

Cadence Design Systems slipped 0.6% in premarket trading after the chip designer beat analysts' third-quarter earnings target and raised its guidance. Its shares were up 23% over the year through Monday's close. The company's design software is a staple of chip development across the semiconductor industry.

AI Momentum Builds

Artificial intelligence stocks continued to benefit from renewed investor interest. On Monday, Anthropic filed its IPO investor prospectus publicly, a document that laid out both the promise and the risks of artificial intelligence. Publicly filing a prospectus is a standard step toward a stock market listing, opening a company's financial details to outside investors.

The AI rally also reached Asia, where it helped lift South Korean chip stocks and the KOSPI index, South Korea's benchmark stock gauge, pointing to a solid opening for US technology shares.

Heavy Earnings Slate

A long list of blue-chip companies is scheduled to report quarterly results ahead of Tuesday's opening bell, headlined by Coca-Cola, Boeing, UPS, Visa, S&P Global, Corning, HCA Healthcare, Freeport-McMoRan, Sherwin-Williams, Hilton Worldwide, Royal Caribbean and PayPal. The slate spans consumer staples, aerospace, logistics, payments, mining, health care and hospitality, giving investors a single-session cross-section of corporate America.

Fed Meeting Gets Underway

Federal Reserve policymakers began a two-day meeting on Tuesday, where they will debate whether hotter-than-expected inflation calls for an increase in interest rates. Investors are not convinced the central bank will act, pricing in just 10% odds of a hike, according to CME Group. Rate decisions shape borrowing costs for businesses and households, and even a widely expected outcome tends to be parsed for signals about the policy path ahead.

Wednesday brings the week's most closely watched lineup for tech investors. Alphabet and Microsoft will report their third-quarter results, and the Federal Reserve will announce its interest rate decision the same day. Both companies are among the heaviest spenders on AI infrastructure, and their cloud operations are widely watched as a measure of how the AI build-out is translating into revenue.