By Sruthi Shankar
(Reuters) - Wall Street was set to open slightly higher on Thursday, with investors assessing a flood of corporate results in one of the busiest days for the third-quarter earnings season.
U.S. stock futures briefly pared some gains after Politico reported that current Fed Chair Janet Yellen and former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh were out of the race for the central bank's top job.
Fed Governor Jerome Powell and Stanford University economist John Taylor are the frontrunners, the report added.
However, a White House official said no final decision had been made.
Quarterly results of technology giants Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft and Intel will be in focus when they report after the closing bell.
Earnings so far have been largely positive, with 72.1 percent of the 165 S&P 500 companies that reported as of Wednesday topping expectations and matching the average for the past four quarters.
However, with U.S. indexes at record levels, investors are taking a closer look at earnings to see if they justify stretched valuations.
"Investors' expectations for forward guidance are very high, and any misses will continue to be punished," said Peter Cecchini, chief market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald in New York.
"The dispersion in reaction to the performance of companies that don't meet expectations is a lot worse than if it does. Not everything is going up, people are actually paying attention to what the actual results are, which is actually somewhat new."
Wall Street fell on Wednesday, with the Dow Industrials and S&P 500 indexes suffering their worst day in seven weeks, on a batch of soft quarterly earnings and a rise in bond yields.
Dow e-minis were up 54 points, or 0.23 percent, with 26,910 contracts changing hands at 8:32 a.m. ET (1232 GMT).
S&P 500 e-minis were up 3.25 points, or 0.13 percent, with 206,385 contracts traded.
Nasdaq 100 e-minis were down 0.5 points, or 0.01 percent, on volume of 35,096 contracts.
Twitter jumped 12.1 percent after the company said it could turn its first ever profit in the fourth quarter, helped by cost cuts and new sources of revenue.
Celgene plunged about 20 percent after its quarterly revenue missed estimates, while Amgen fell 3.5 percent after reporting weaker-than-expected sales of a new drug. Ford gained 2 percent after reporting a better-than-expected profit, driven by sales of high-margin pickup trucks and SUVs in the U.S. market and cost cutting.
A Labor Department report showed the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits increased less than expected last week, suggesting the labor market continued to tighten after recent hurricane-related disruptions.
Weekly jobless claims increased to 233,000 for the week ended Oct. 21, after falling to its lowest level in more than 44 years the week before. Economists had expected a rise to 235,000.
(Reporting by Sruthi Shankar in Bengaluru; Editing by Anil D'Silva)
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