Jobless Claims Tick in Higher

Pre-market futures are sliding back into the red at this hour, on less-than-stellar numbers out this morning for Weekly Jobless Claims, Philly Fed and Walmart earnings. The Dow is -157 points currently, the S&P 500 is -24, the Nasdaq -90 and the small-cap Russell 2000 is -12. Over the past five trading days, these major indexes are down between -1% (Dow) and -3% (Nasdaq).

Economic Prints Ahead of the Bell: Jobless Claims, Philly Fed

Initial Jobless Claims are out this Thursday morning, jumping to their highest levels since June, to 235K for last week. This is 10K above expectations and 11K north of the previous week’s tally. Continuing Claims inched closer to that 2 million mark two weeks ago (Continuing Claims report a week in arrears from Initial Claims) to 1.972 million — the highest since November 2021, when jobless claims were moving in the opposite direction.

A new Philly Fed Manufacturing survey was released this morning as well, swinging to a negative -0.3 from an expected 7.0 and prior month’s healthy 15.9. This August number marks the fourth month in the past five notching negative manufacturing output from the Philadelphia Fed. New Orders fell to -1.9 — -20 points month over month — while Shipments also came down but stayed positive: 4.5.

Walmart Posts Mixed Q2, Ups Sales Guidance

Shares of Walmart WMT are down -2% at this hour ahead of the open, as the big-box discount retail giant posted mixed Q2 results this morning. Earnings of 68 cents per share came in a nickel shy of the Zacks consensus — and only a penny above the year-ago earnings figure — on $177.4 billion in revenues, outpacing estimates by +1%. The company also revised its revenue guidance higher for the full fiscal year.

What to Expect from the Stock Market Today

After the opening bell, we’ll take a look at flash S&P Services and Manufacturing PMI for the month of August. Expectations are for both to cool off a tad — to 55.0 on the Services side, still nicely above the 50-threshold between growth and loss, and just below that threshold on Manufacturing, to 49.5.

Also, Existing Home Sales for July are also expected to tick down just a bit, to 3.91 million seasonally adjusted, annualized units, from 3.93 million the prior month. And U.S. Leading Economic Indicators (LEI) will hit the tape later this morning, expected to improve to -0.1% for July from -0.3% in June, off the lowest levels recorded in morev than 10 years, Covid-era included.

Earnings season continues after today’s closing bell, as well. Zoom Communications ZM, Workday WDAY, Ross Stores ROST and Intuit INTU, among others, are expected to report quarterly earnings, with Zacks Rank #2 (Buy)-rated Intuit expected to fetch earnings growth of +33% year over year.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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