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Pre-market indices are flowing back higher this morning. This was the case even before economic reports and new earnings results have hit the tape, and have continued upward from yesterday’s late sell-off from session highs. Currently, pre-market futures appear thusly: the Dow is +216 points, the S&P 500 is +37 and the Nasdaq is +175 at this hour. The Dow and small-cap Russell 2000 finished yesterday’s regular trading just above breakeven; the S&P and Nasdaq just below.
This being Thursday morning, Initial Jobless Claims are out. A total of 208K new claims were made last month, below the 212K expected, and exactly in-line with the slightly upwardly revised previous week. This is the smallest amount of new jobless claims since the second week of February. Over the past 13 weeks or so, we’ve remained pretty steady at around 210K initial claims, which is consistent with a robust labor market. Long gone are the days of last summer, when we saw more than 260K new claims.
Continuing Claims also remained remarkably well behaved. New longer-term jobless claims came in at 1.774 million, in line with the slightly downward adjustment to the previous week. On this metric, we’d been hovering around 1.8 million — already a very healthy number for overall employment — and over the past two prints we look to have tacked slightly lower. January’s 1.73 million is our near-term low; November of last year was the outlying highest read, 1.93 million.
A new preliminary report on non-farm Productivity for Q1 is also out this morning. The headline of +0.3% missed expectations for +0.5% in the quarter, well off the previous quarter’s pace, which has been upwardly revised by 30 basis points (bps) to +3.5%. Today’s print is the lowest read on Productivity — the economic elixir that bolsters growth without copious amounts of inflation included — in a year, and is prone to future revisions.
Unit Labor Costs, on the other hand, jumped notably higher. Headline +4.7% is a big move above the +4.0% estimate, and far beyond the downwardly adjusted 0.0% reported for Q4. This is the hottest print since, again, Q1 2023. In a sea of mostly reasonable earnings results and economic metrics of late, this would be the rottenest apple of the bunch: weakening productivity with higher labor costs is the exact direction we do not want to see the economy go.
Speaking of Apple (AAPL - Free Report) , the world’s largest company reports fiscal Q2 earnings after today’s close. Negative growth year over year is expected both in sales (-5.1%) and earnings (-0.7%). Apple has only missed on earnings estimates once in the past five years, so we might expect these numbers to be slightly higher. Also travel sites Booking.com (BKNG - Free Report) and Expedia (EXPE - Free Report) will be out with quarterly numbers this afternoon.
Ahead of the open, ConocoPhillips (COP - Free Report) reported Q1 earnings. The company beat on the bottom line by +2% — earnings of $2.03 versus expectations of $1.99 (but down from $2.38 per share from the year-ago quarter). Revenues of $14.48 billion came in -1.67% below estimates, and beneath the $15.52 billion from Q1 2023. Much of the recent adjustments higher in oil prices will likely manifest themselves in the international super-major’s Q2 account.
Wendy’s (WEN - Free Report) put up slightly mixed numbers for its Q1 this morning. Earnings of 23 cents per share outpaced the Zacks consensus by 2 cents per share. Revenues, on the other hand, came in at $534.75 million, which amount to a negative surprise of -1.23%, though higher than the $528.8 million reported a year ago. The company only has one earnings miss in the past eight quarters, and shares are up +1.7% in today’s pre-market.
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Initial Claims Fall Below Expectations
Pre-market indices are flowing back higher this morning. This was the case even before economic reports and new earnings results have hit the tape, and have continued upward from yesterday’s late sell-off from session highs. Currently, pre-market futures appear thusly: the Dow is +216 points, the S&P 500 is +37 and the Nasdaq is +175 at this hour. The Dow and small-cap Russell 2000 finished yesterday’s regular trading just above breakeven; the S&P and Nasdaq just below.
This being Thursday morning, Initial Jobless Claims are out. A total of 208K new claims were made last month, below the 212K expected, and exactly in-line with the slightly upwardly revised previous week. This is the smallest amount of new jobless claims since the second week of February. Over the past 13 weeks or so, we’ve remained pretty steady at around 210K initial claims, which is consistent with a robust labor market. Long gone are the days of last summer, when we saw more than 260K new claims.
Continuing Claims also remained remarkably well behaved. New longer-term jobless claims came in at 1.774 million, in line with the slightly downward adjustment to the previous week. On this metric, we’d been hovering around 1.8 million — already a very healthy number for overall employment — and over the past two prints we look to have tacked slightly lower. January’s 1.73 million is our near-term low; November of last year was the outlying highest read, 1.93 million.
A new preliminary report on non-farm Productivity for Q1 is also out this morning. The headline of +0.3% missed expectations for +0.5% in the quarter, well off the previous quarter’s pace, which has been upwardly revised by 30 basis points (bps) to +3.5%. Today’s print is the lowest read on Productivity — the economic elixir that bolsters growth without copious amounts of inflation included — in a year, and is prone to future revisions.
Unit Labor Costs, on the other hand, jumped notably higher. Headline +4.7% is a big move above the +4.0% estimate, and far beyond the downwardly adjusted 0.0% reported for Q4. This is the hottest print since, again, Q1 2023. In a sea of mostly reasonable earnings results and economic metrics of late, this would be the rottenest apple of the bunch: weakening productivity with higher labor costs is the exact direction we do not want to see the economy go.
Speaking of Apple (AAPL - Free Report) , the world’s largest company reports fiscal Q2 earnings after today’s close. Negative growth year over year is expected both in sales (-5.1%) and earnings (-0.7%). Apple has only missed on earnings estimates once in the past five years, so we might expect these numbers to be slightly higher. Also travel sites Booking.com (BKNG - Free Report) and Expedia (EXPE - Free Report) will be out with quarterly numbers this afternoon.
Ahead of the open, ConocoPhillips (COP - Free Report) reported Q1 earnings. The company beat on the bottom line by +2% — earnings of $2.03 versus expectations of $1.99 (but down from $2.38 per share from the year-ago quarter). Revenues of $14.48 billion came in -1.67% below estimates, and beneath the $15.52 billion from Q1 2023. Much of the recent adjustments higher in oil prices will likely manifest themselves in the international super-major’s Q2 account.
Wendy’s (WEN - Free Report) put up slightly mixed numbers for its Q1 this morning. Earnings of 23 cents per share outpaced the Zacks consensus by 2 cents per share. Revenues, on the other hand, came in at $534.75 million, which amount to a negative surprise of -1.23%, though higher than the $528.8 million reported a year ago. The company only has one earnings miss in the past eight quarters, and shares are up +1.7% in today’s pre-market.