Wall Street is gearing up for another big economic data

Stock futures traded slightly higher in Wednesday night to extend gains from a positive session earlier, with the three major indexes recovering from some heavy selling pressure earlier this month.

Contracts on the S&P 500 moved higher as the overnight session kicked off. Futures of Dow and Nasdaq gained also.

Traders are looking ahead to a set of key economic data on Thursday, which will show how solidly the consumer held back as the latest wave of the coronavirus spread in the U.S. Commerce Department's August retail sales report is expected to show a back-to-back monthly drop in spending, with overall sales likely to fall by 0.7% on the month after a 1.1% drop in July, according to Bloomberg data.

We're expecting another Hard Retail Sales report for August, but to put these numbers in context, the control measure — which generates the non-durable goods component of total consumer spending — is probably still running about 6% above its January January level, Ian Shepherdson, chief U.S. economist from Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote in an on Wednesday tweet.

He added that a moderation in the monthly data after March's nearly 9% jump in monthly sales was inevitable, given that people had spent their last round of stimulus checks authorized by the American Rescue Plan Act.

The correction probably has been magnified by the influence of the Delta variant, which also has depressed spending, but it's impossible to separate these two effects with any confidence, Shepherdson said.

The latest data will also serve as an initial indicator of the relative strength in economic activity after an initial reopening surge in late spring and summer. While many economists have agreed the real trend is of decelerating growth, the overall extent of the deceleration remains to be seen.

Despite the uncertainty in equity investors, this uncertainty has also left major investors closely monitoring the incoming data for signals of how the economic backdrop could influence the earnings picture. Amid concerns including the Delta variant, permanent supply chain constraints, labor shortages and a potential policy pivot by the Federal Reserve, the S&P 500 has so far fallen 0.9% in September.

Equity markets have been positive for seven consecutive months, which is quite rare So yes, investors are rightly concerned, Akshata Bailkeri, Bruderman Asset Management equity analyst, told Yahoo Finance. The reason why we see this is because these earnings behind a lot of these companies are continuing to grow and that's really what drives these index values higher. As FactSet noted in its latest weekly report, consensus analysts are still expecting S&P 500 earnings growth of nearly 28% for the third quarter. While a deceleration from the more than 80% growth rate posted in the second quarter of this year, that would still mark the third-highest year-over-year increase in earnings for the index since 2010. The third quarter earnings reporting season is expected to pick up next month.

I don't think statistics or just how long it has been is a good reason for a market correction Generally, you need some sort of negative catalyst, Randy Frederick, Charles Schwab's managing director of trading derivatives, told Yahoo Finance. What we have not positive catalysts so much as the lack of negative catalysts? What caused some of this more recent volatility is that we've had a number of Wall Street companies that have downgraded both GDP estimates and corporate earnings estimates, he added. These are just forecasts, they may turn out not to be right. Certainly the earnings results in the last two quarters have substantially outperformed expectations. Today were the main moves in markets as of Wednesday evening:

Emily McCormick is a reporter for Yahoo Finance.