Continuing Claims Climb for a Second Week

Pre-market futures are up respectably at this hour, unbothered by the slight uptick to Weekly Jobless Claims out this Thursday morning. The Dow is currently +143 points, the S&P 500 is +21, the Nasdaq +77 and the small-cap Russell 2000 +19. 

It’s been a healthy past five days of trading, with yesterday taking a bit of a breather. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is still slightly negative year to date, but the Dow is +4% and the Russell 2000 up +7.9% since the start of 2026. Getting here has been a tad choppy, but overall we’re looking pretty good.

Weekly Jobless Claims Inch Upward

Initial Jobless Claims came in a smidge above expectations to 227K last week, below the slightly upwardly revised 232K the previous week. We appear to be back to early December levels, where we gravitated more than half of last year — off historic lows but still consistent with a reasonably healthy labor market. Basically, we look to have emerged back to where we were after whatever holiday seasonality occurred.

Continuing Claims bumped up for the second straight week, to 1.862 million from an unrevised 1.844 million the prior week. Two prints ago, we saw the lowest longer-term jobless claim tally since May of 2024: 1.819 million. Currently, we again appear to be reverting back to the norm, aka “not too shabby.” (We’d been at or north of 1.9 million from last May to Thanksgiving before dropping off.)
 

Q4 Earnings Out This Morning: CROX, TRIP, HWM

Today is also the busiest day for earnings reports, with more than 200 companies releasing quarterly numbers between this morning and this afternoon. Crocs CROX had a surprisingly good Q4, beating earnings estimates by +19.3% to $2.29 per share on $957.64 million, outpacing the Zacks consensus by +4.25%. Shares are up +14.8% on the news, taking the stock into the green year to date. 

Meanwhile, TripAdvisor TRIP posted misses on both top and bottom lines this morning: earnings of +$0.04 per share was -73% below the +$0.15 expected, on revenues of $411 million which were -0.56% below projections — just in-line with revenues in the year-ago quarter. Shares had already been down -16.5% year to date, and are sliding another -5% at this hour. 

Defense and aerospace components maker Howmet HWM outperformed in its Q4 report this morning, with earnings of $1.05 per share outpacing the $0.97 expected for a +8.25% beat. Revenues of $2.16 billion bettered expectations by +1.26%, ahead of the $1.89 billion from a year ago. Shares were up +12.6% from the start of the year, and have gained another +5.7% at this hour

After today’s closing bell, we’ll get another full plate of earnings to report on. These include Arista Networks ANET, Roku ROKU, Wynn Resorts WYNN and Expedia EXPE.

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

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