Let’s kick things off with a look at Wall Street, which ran out of stamina during the session overnight as investors wait for next week’s US inflation data.

That’s not to say that the indices struggled though — the Dow and S&P 500 both ended 0.1% higher, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq was 0.1% lower at the close.

As CommSec senior market analyst Tom Piotrowski put it:

“To be candid, the session was pretty underwhelming in terms of the overall moves for the markets.”

After an aggressive sell off in early April, markets have recovered and are back at the levels they were before they sold off — and  Piotrowski says now it’s a matter of what’s going to change the landscape.

“It’s a question of what’s going to be the catalyst to push them one direction or the other, and in the next couple of days, there’ll be an absence of key information,” he said.

“So we’re essentially in a bit of a holding pattern until those inflation numbers come out.”

But despite the muted session for the US markets, government bonds for long and short-term interest rates moved lower, which he described as a “pretty constructive trend overall”.

We’ll touch on the European markets shortly (and spoiler, they hit record highs overnight), but all of this leads to the ASX kicking off the day’s trade with a modest gain of around 0.2% later this morning, according to futures.

You know the drill — grab a coffee, settle in, and let’s get this show on the road.