US STOCKS-Wall St set for stronger open despite mixed data

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* Futures up: Dow 0.18%, S&P 0.23%, Nasdaq 0.19%
* U.S. consumer spending barely rises in August
* Wells Fargo rises in premarket on new CEO appointment
* Micron Tech falls on weak Q1 profit outlook

(Adds comment, detail, updates numbers)
By Ambar Warrick and Medha Singh
Sept 27 (Reuters) - U.S. stock markets were set to gain on
Friday but the S&P 500 and Nasdaq may still end a volatile week
in the red as the shock of the launch of an impeachment
investigation into President Donald Trump counters hopes of
progress with China on trade.
Futures for all of Wall Street's three main indices were up
around 0.2%, with shares in U.S. banking major Wells Fargo & Co
WFC.N up 3.3% after it named a new chief executive while
Facebook Inc FB.O , Netflix NFLX.O , and Amazon.com Inc
AMZN.O all recovered some of this week's losses.
Upbeat comments late on Thursday from China's foreign
minister Wang Yi helped halt losses as investors await a new
round of trade talks between Washington and Beijing next month.
Yet analysts and traders say the volatility of the day to
day messages from both sides in a conflict that dates back over
a year has left investors with little faith that a full-scale
resolution is in prospect any time soon.
"Could we get a positive headline on trade? Yes, but it will
be optics at best," said Peter Cecchini, chief market strategist
at Cantor Fitzgerald in New York. "I don't expect anything that
happens before the elections to be a comprehensive deal."
"Investors are generally ignoring a plethora of risks... One
of the reasons they are willing to do that is foreign investors
need a place to go and on a relative basis the United States is
still sort of the best house in a bad global neighborhood."
Markets this week have been particularly vulnerable to
headlines on Sino-U.S. trade talks and political ructions in
Washington, before the start of third quarter corporate
earnings.
Futures were little changed after data showed U.S. consumer
spending barely rose in August, suggesting that the economy's
main growth engine was slowing after accelerating sharply in the
second quarter. New orders for key U.S.-made capital goods also unexpectedly
fell in August, but the so-called core PCE price index, the
Fed's preferred inflation measure, rose to 1.8% in August, the
biggest rise in prices since January. University of Michigan survey on consumer sentiment is
expected at 10:00 a.m. ET.
Micron Technology Inc MU.O tumbled 5.1% premarket as it
forecast first-quarter profit below Wall Street targets, saying
it was "mindful" of economic and trade uncertainty even though
there were signs of an uptick in memory chip demand.
Other semiconductor companies Advanced Micro Devices Inc
AMD.O , Nvidia Corp NVDA.O dropped about 0.8% and 1.1%,
respectively.
At 8:54 a.m. ET, Dow e-minis 1YMcv1 were up 48 points, or
0.18%. S&P 500 e-minis EScv1 were up 7 points, or 0.23% and
Nasdaq 100 e-minis NQcv1 were up 14.5 points, or 0.19%.