Market Participants Thankful Ahead of the Open

Wednesday, November 26, 2025

Pre-market futures are in the green again this hour and holding steady through the release of a few key pieces of data this morning. This follows a highly successful trading day, up half a point to +2%, depending on the market index, on Tuesday. The Dow is +77 points at this hour, the S&P 500 +18 and the Nasdaq +107 points. The small-cap Russell 2000 — that gainer of +2% yesterday — is trading flat at present.

Interestingly, upon the economic reports out ahead of today’s open, the bond market seems to have frozen in place at this hour: +4.01% on the 10-year yield and +3.48% on the 2-year. These bond rates are about as honest a proxy on interest rate sentiment as we currently have, particularly with Fed members now in a “blackout period” regarding the press ahead of the December 10th FOMC decision.
 

Weekly Jobless Claims Remain Tame: +216K, +1.96M

Thankfully, Weekly Jobless Claims have returned to our weekly discourse on economic analysis; over time, the feeling of “flying blind” without out it had begun to grow somewhat concerning. The good thing is, not much has changed on these metrics, so we don’t feel we’ve missed much over a dormant month and a half.

Initial Jobless Claims came in below estimates — +216K versus expectations for +225K, and below the slightly upwardly revised +222K from the previous week. Aside from an early September +264K anomaly which stand out on the graph like a middle finger, new jobless claims have remained resilient within a +220K-235K range going all the way back to February. In fact, today’s tally comes in below that range; is the jobs market actually improving?

Continuing Claims are even more fascinating in how they’ve stayed in place for so long: today’s total of 1.960 million is actually up from the drastically downwardly revised 1.953 million from the prior week; it originally had come in at 1.974 million a week ago, which was the highest level in four years. Now it’s been revised back into the pack.

From mid-2022 lows on longer-term jobless claims, it took basically a year to move from 1.35 million to 1.8 million. It was nearly two years after that we first saw a 1.9 million tally, which first appeared in May of this year. Over these past six months, we remain below 2 million longer-term jobless claims. You could scarcely wish for jobless rates this calm.
 

Durable Goods Orders In-Line: +0.5%

Coming off a strangely hot previous month, the delayed September preliminary Durable Goods Orders report came in at +0.5%, as expected. August’s +2.9% was the highest single-month rate in more than a decade. These figures tend to fluctuate depending on the type of durable goods being ordered, which is why this data gets parsed more finely:

Ex-Transportation in general, this bumps up slightly to +0.6% — a similar dynamic to what we saw in Retail Sales reported yesterday — and ramps way up to +0.9% on non-Defense, ex-aircraft durable goods orders (a proxy for “regular” business spending). This is the second month in a row at that +0.9% level, which may point to the hardware buildout in overall AI infrastructure development (this report does not yet segment AI-related businesses).

Taken in combination with the tame jobless claims data, what we can see emerging on the horizon is a familiar “good news is bad news” take: if the labor force remains stout (and jobless claims data does tend to bring better news than monthly job gains reports) and economic spending continues, regardless whether inflation rates are at optimum levels or not, then why in the world would the Fed be interested in lowering interest rates?
 

Deere & Co. Mixed in Fiscal Q4

Machinery giant Deere & Co. DE is out with fiscal Q4 results ahead of the open, missing earnings estimates by 3 cents to $3.93 per share — the company’s first earnings miss in three years. However, revenues in the quarter came in +5.92% ahead of expectations to $10.58 billion. With a slightly dimmer outlook, shares are trading down -3.5% at this hour, taking a bite out of the stock’s +17.6% gains year to date. For more on DE’s earnings, click here. https://www.zacks.com/stock/news/2795724/deere-de-q4-earnings-miss-estimates
 

Holiday Travel Expected to Reach New Record High

An estimated 31 million people are expected to travel for their Thanksgiving holiday feasts, starting earlier this week. This isn’t necessarily to say that the major airlines -- Delta DAL, American AAL and United UAL, to name but a few -- are seeing a big boost in early trading today (nor have they been much to write home about all year), but it again points to a consumer not shying away from the expenses of travel in late 2025.

If you are traveling to spend time with family and friends, we wish you a happy, safe and healthy weekend. Ahead of Wall Street will return Friday morning for a half-day session in the markets and the ushering-in of Black Friday.

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