On Wednesday, U.S. stock index futures dipped slightly as investors evaluated remarks from Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on how long it might take to tame inflation. However, a jump in Microsoft stock kept losses in check.

Powell said on Tuesday he expects 2023 to be a year of “significant declines in inflation”.

He acknowledged that interest rates might need to rise more than anticipated but added that the fight against inflation would take some time.

“The underlying worries about just how high rates will have to go are bubbling to the surface again, following yesterday’s exuberance over indications that disinflationary forces were taking hold,” Susannah Streeter, markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said.

As investors wait for new data to come in, which they think will shed new information on the future of Fed policy, the “see-saw attitude” is expected to continue.

Following a positive jobs report on Friday, Powell’s remarks on Tuesday helped boost the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq, two of the major indexes on Wall Street.

After suffering losses in 2018, U.S. stocks are off to a great start in 2023, driven by battered megacap growth stocks on hopes that the Fed will scale back its hawkish rate rises.

Microsoft Stock (NASDAQ:MSFT) increased 1.9% in premarket trade after the tech behemoth announced it was integrating artificial intelligence into both its Edge web browser and Bing search engine.

Later in the day, several Fed officials will state that traders will widely watch for more cues on the direction the central bank will take with future interest rate increases.

Money market participants project the Fed’s terminal rate to be 5.14% by July, with a 98.5% chance of a rate increase of 25 basis points in March.

Later in the day, the following companies will release their quarterly financial results: Yum Brands Inc., CVS Health Corp. (NYSE:CVS), Uber Technologies Inc., and Walt Disney (NYSE:DIS) Co.

Over half of the S&P 500 businesses have so far reported quarterly earnings, and 69.1% of them, according to Refinitiv, exceeded forecasts. Analysts anticipate a 3.1% fall in fourth-quarter earnings.

At 5:50 a.m. ET, the S&P 500 was down 10.25 points, or 0.25%, the Nasdaq 100 was down 26 points, or 0.20%, and the Dow was down 55 points, or 0.16%.