5 Things You Should Know Before the Stock Market Opens

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Stock futures in the U.S. were indicating a flat opening Tuesday ahead of manufacturing data and earnings reports from Pfizer and Sirius .

Many markets in Europe were closed for May Day holidays. Britain's FTSE rose was trading slightly higher.

Japan's Nikkei 225 fell Tuesday 1.8% to close at 9,350.95. Shares of exporters were hit by a stronger yen.

The economic calendar Tuesday in the U.S. includes the Institute of Supply Management's manufacturing index for April at 10 a.m. EDT. Economists are calling for a slight decline to 53, according to Briefing.com.

April sales reports from automakers Ford and General Motors , among others, are expected throughout Tuesday.

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Dow component Pfizer is expected Tuesday to report first-quarter earnings of 56 cents a share on revenue of $15.47 billion.

Sirius XM Radio , the satellite radio company, is expected by analysts to post first-quarter profit of 2 cents a share on revenue of $803.8 million.

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Bank of America , the No. 2 U.S. bank by assets, is planning about 2,000 staff cuts in its investment banking, commercial banking and non-U.S. wealth-management units, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the situation.

The cuts are coming at operations that vastly expanded with Bank of America's 2009 purchase of Merrill Lynch , the Journal noted, and they come on top of a plan announced by the bank last year to eliminate 30,000 consumer banking jobs over three years.

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Oil giant BP said first-quarter net profit fell 18% to $5.9 billion, hurt by weakness in its downstream business.

Underlying replacement cost profit at BP's downstream business fell 58%.

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Rupert Murdoch and his son James will hear Tuesday what lawmakers think of how they handled the phone-hacking scandal that brought down tabloid News of the World .

The British lawmakers are expected to publish a report on how senior executives at News International, an arm of News Corp., , handled the crisis.

The committee is likely to criticize James Murdoch for failing to get to the bottom of the scandal, and Rupert Murdoch for the wider culture at the company, a source familiar with the situation told Reuters.

The report could force James Murdoch to sever his last ties with BSkyB, Britain's biggest satellite TV company, which News Corp. had sought to acquire before the scandal broke, according to Reuters.

-- Written by Joseph Woelfel

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