(Reuters) -Futures tracking Wall Street's main indexes paused on Thursday as lackluster quarterly updates from Tesla and IBM weighed on sentiment, while simmering U.S.-China trade tensions kept investors on the edge.

Tesla shares were down 3.3% in premarket trading, after its third-quarter profit fell short of market estimates. A revenue beat offered little relief, as Wall Street grappled with fading optimism.

The electric vehicle maker's results kicked off the "Magnificent Seven" earnings parade, a group now commanding nearly 35% weight on S&P 500, with the power to steer the market's direction.

IBM dropped 6.6% after the mega-cap company recorded a slowdown in growth in its key cloud software segment.

U.S. equity markets, having flirted with record highs, lost steam amid a whirlwind of earnings reports and profit-taking.

While most companies have outpaced analyst expectations, their cautious outlooks have cast a shadow over the rally. And with benchmark moves muted this week, investors are parsing earnings reports line by line to justify lofty equity valuations.

At 05:43 a.m., Dow E-minis were down 116 points, or 0.25%, S&P 500 E-minis were down 0.5 point, or 0.01% and Nasdaq 100 E-minis were up 6.75 points, or 0.03%.

IonQ and Rigetti Computing jumped more than 12% each, while D-Wave Quantum surged 16.7% after the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. President Donald Trump's administration was in talks with several Quantum computing companies to take equity stakes in exchange for federal funding.

Molina Healthcare plunged 20.8% after slashing its annual profit forecast. Among other U.S. health insurers, Centene dropped 6.2%, UnitedHealth fell 1.6% and Humana lost 1.6%.

Intel slipped 0.4% ahead of its results aftermarket.

T-Mobile and American Airlines rose more than 1% each ahead of their results before the bell.

DATA DROUGHT DRAGS ON

As the U.S. government shutdown stretched into its twenty-third day, Thursday's usual reading of weekly jobless claims data will be absent, leaving investors in the dark.

With the data pipeline clogged, attention shifts to Friday's core CPI, expected to hold steady at 3.1% - potentially the Federal Reserve's only clear inflation signal ahead of its policy meeting next week.

Markets have already priced in a 25-basis-point rate cut, with traders betting the Fed will ease again in December.

Meanwhile, a Reuters report said the Trump administration was weighing sweeping curbs on high-tech exports to China - from laptops to jet engines - in retaliation for Beijing's latest restrictions on rare earth shipments. The report pushed markets lower on Wednesday, injecting fresh uncertainty.