Thursday, September 18, 2025
Pre-market futures are up to start the first trading session since the Fed lowered interest rates 25 basis points (bps) yesterday. New data out this morning sees futures rolling off their early tops, but ultimately the reports are good. The Dow is up +230 points, the S&P 500 is +51, the Nasdaq +287 and the small-cap Russell 2000 is +30 points. Bond yields haver ticked up from yesterday a tad: +4.08% on the 10-year and +3.55% on the 2-year.
Weekly Jobless Claims Move Lower
Due to a disruption in jobless claims reporting from Texas last week, to the tune of 15K, we saw
Initial Jobless Claims spike to a now upwardly revised +264K, which represents the highest week of new jobless claims since October 2021. We’re back down to +231K for last week, which is back in range with where we’ve been most of 2025.
Continuing Claims, reporting a week in arrears from initial claims, continues to dwindle from recent highs: 1.920 million is the lowest print since May, and the second week in a row beneath 1.94 million, where we were for 12 weeks (without touching 2 million longer-term jobless claims). These recent highs were last matched back in November of 2021.
Weekly Jobless Claims obviously do not tell the entire labor story. Continuing Claims, for instance, expire after a certain amount of weeks and are no longer counted; it’s possible we have more people out of work than this data cites. Then again, this is likely the case for all employment data: even the BLS numbers do not count recent college graduates who aren’t getting hired as unemployed; they haven’t yet registered as part of the labor force.
Philly Fed Zooms Up in September
The monthly manufacturing survey for the region around the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the
Philly Fed Index, posted its highest monthly tally since January: +23.2. We’ve now posted five up-months for 2025 and four down. This is a fairly volatile index that has seen a high this year of +44.3 (January) and a low of -26.4 (April). This also runs counter to the similar Empire State Index, which posted a negative -8.7 for this month.
Earnings Reports for Today: DRI, FDX, LEN
Ahead of the open,
Darden Restaurants DRI — the parent of Olive Garden, as well as steakhouses Ruth’s Chris, LongHorn, and others — missed bottom-line estimates for its fiscal Q1 out this morning: earnings of $1.97 per share missed the Zacks consensus by 3 cents. Revenues of $3.04 billion eked out a beat of +0.17%, up from $2.76 billion a year ago. For more on DRI’s earnings, click here.
After today’s closing bell, we’ll see fresh Q3 reports for
FedEx FDX and homebuilder
Lennar Homes LEN. Expectations are for earnings growth at FedEx around +1.4% on +0.9% on the top line. Lennar meets some tough comps: it is expected to reap -45% earnings growth and -4% on revenue.
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Darden Restaurants, Inc. (DRI): Free Stock Analysis Report FedEx Corporation (FDX): Free Stock Analysis Report Lennar Corporation (LEN): Free Stock Analysis ReportThis article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).
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