US STOCKS-Wall St set to slip at open on gloomy jobless claims data, tech slide

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* Big tech firms fall in premarket trading
* Walmart slides as lackluster outlook overshadows upbeat Q4
sales
* Facebook shares slip following news blackout move in
Australia
* Futures down: Dow 0.54%, S&P 0.62%, Nasdaq 0.92%

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By Devik Jain and Shreyashi Sanyal
Feb 18 (Reuters) - Wall Street's main indexes were set to
open lower on Thursday as investors resumed a shift out of big
technology firms, while an unexpected rise in weekly jobless
claims underscored a fragile labor market recovery.
The Labor Department's report showed initial claims for
state unemployment benefits were 861,000 last week, compared
with 848,000 in the prior week. "The one part of the economy that has remained disappointing
is clearly the employment picture," said Ryan Detrick, chief
market strategist at LPL Financial in Charlotte, North Carolina.
U.S. stock indexes hit record highs at the beginning of the
week but gradually retreated following a rise in treasury bond
yields, which led to fears of higher inflation. US/
Those concerns have spurred investors to book profit on
stocks with high valuation in the S&P 500 technology .SPLRCT
and communications services .SPLRCL sectors, which have
underpinned a 76% rise in the benchmark index .SPX since its
March 2020 lows. Shares of Apple Inc AAPL.O , Microsoft Corp MSFT.O ,
Amazon.com Inc AMZN.O , and Alphabet Inc GOOGL.O were down
between 0.7% and 2.3% in premarket trading.
"A steady slow increase may not necessarily disrupt the
uptrend in equities but will likely force rotation from highly
priced stocks, typically in the tech sector, to more reasonably
priced cyclical ones," said Hussein Sayed, chief market
strategist at FXTM.
Facebook Inc FB.O shares slipped around 1% on Thursday as
Wall Street assessed the wider ramifications of its move to
block all news content in Australia. Walmart Inc WMT.N slid 5% after the world's largest
retailer missed quarterly profit estimates and predicted fiscal
2022 net sales to rise in low single digits.
At 8:40 a.m. ET, Dow e-minis 1YMcv1 were down 171 points,
or 0.54%, S&P 500 e-minis EScv1 were down 24.5 points, or
0.62%, and Nasdaq 100 e-minis NQcv1 were down 126.25 points,
or 0.92%.
Marriott International Inc MAR.O dipped 0.5% after
reporting a quarterly loss as the world's largest hotel chain's
bookings declined due to pandemic-induced travel restrictions.