5 things to know before the stock market opens Friday

Dow futures pointed to an over 200 point gain at Wall Street’s open on this Friday the 13th of November. The Dow Jones Industrial Average sank 317 points Thursday, after a small loss Wednesday, as the U.S. kept seeing the worst new daily coronavirus cases of the pandemic. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq also fell Thursday.

Heading into Friday’s trading, the Dow and S&P 500 were tracking for weekly gains, while the Nasdaq was looking at losses for the week. All three stock benchmarks hit intraday all-time highs Monday, but none of them closed at records. The Dow’s February record close still stands. The S&P and Nasdaq last closed at record highs in early September.

Shares of Disney, one of the 30 Dow components, jumped nearly 4% in Friday’s premarket, a day after the media and theme park giant reported a smaller-than-expected loss and better-than-expected revenue in its fiscal fourth quarter. The Disney+ streaming service had more than 73 million paid subscribers as Oct. 3, the end of the company’s fiscal year. Disney said it would forgo its January dividend payment but still expects to pay the dividend in the future.

While most Disney theme parks were open during the quarter, the continued closure of Disneyland in California hurt results. At its parks, experiences and products division, Disney said the pandemic cost around $2.4 billion in lost operating income and led to a 61% drop in sales.

Theme parks in California will remain shuttered well into 2021, as state guidelines prohibit reopening until coronavirus cases fall below one per 100,000 in the county where they are located. Orange County, where Disneyland’s two California parks are located, is seeing 5.6 cases per 100,000 people. Los Angeles County, where Comcast-owned Universal Studios is located, is seeing 11.5 cases per 100,000 residents. California on Thursday became the second U.S. state to top 1 million total coronavirus cases, following Texas. The U.S. on Thursday logged 153,496 new infections, the highest daily case count yet.

President-elect Joe Biden now has 290 Electoral College votes — 20 more than needed — after he was projected to win Arizona, NBC News reported. The last time Arizona voted Democratic in a presidential election was 1996, when Bill Clinton was reelected. President Donald Trump, who has been refusing to acknowledge Biden’s victory and fighting it in the courts, remains at 217 Electoral College votes.

Pennsylvania’s top election official, a Democrat, is asking a federal judge to throw out a Trump campaign lawsuit seeking to block the state from certifying its results, which was projected in Biden’s favor. In Georgia, where Biden holds about a 14,000 vote lead over Trump among nearly 5 million cast, election officials are set to begin a recount Friday morning and must end it by 11:59 p.m. ET on Wednesday. Georgia’s certification deadline is next Friday.

The Commerce Department on Thursday said it will abide by an Oct. 30 temporary injunction that prevented the U.S. government from effectively shutting down TikTok. TikTok and its Chinese parent company ByteDance is awaiting more U.S. government guidance about how to proceed with their minority stake sale.

— The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

Disclosure: Comcast is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC.