Thursday, December 15, 2016

Beleaguered Internet firm Yahoo reported more bad news ahead of the bell this Thursday, announcing that a data breach in August 2013 compromised more than one billion (with a “b”) accounts — the biggest data breach in history. The hackers — reportedly working on behalf of a foreign government — used forged cookies that did not require passwords for access to online accounts.

Yahoo shares are down in the pre-market on the report, but the stock is still up 24% from a year ago and more than 150% over the past five years. Although the breach occurred three years back, this may further prod a migration away from Yahoo email usage.

November’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 0.2%, as expected. Stripping out food & energy costs, the figure remains 0.2%. This marks the fourth straight rise in CPI — in-line with most inflation evidence in there domestic economy — and up 1.7% year over year. Core CPI year over year is 2.1%, unchanged from October.

Initial Jobless Claims were mostly in-line with expectations: 254K vs. 256K in the consensus estimate. Still north of 250K, which we dipped below only slightly over the past several weeks, but this remains consistent with a robust U.S. labor market. Continuing claims stayed steady at 1.202 million.

Futures are down slightly in today’s pre-market; there appears to be a cooling-off period before the Dow mounts its attack on the psychologically pleasing 20,000. The Fed raising interest rates 25 basis points (to 0.50-0.75) was the least-newsworthy result possible from this week’s FOMC meeting — either no move or one greater than a quarter-percent would have had a much greater impact on Wednesday trading.

Mark Vickery
Senior Editor

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