Pre-Market Futures Up on Strong Jobless Claims

Thursday, October 1st, 2026

Pre-market futures are back in the green this morning, after petering out somewhat by yesterday’s close, resulting in a mixed trading Hump Day. Oil prices staying right at $100 per barrel (/bbl) on Brent crude, and right around $90/bbl on WTI, are helping improve sentiment: the Dow is +179 points at this hour, the Nasdaq is +169 and the S&P 500 is +32 points currently. The small-cap Russell 2000 is up +10 points at present.

What’s not helping market sentiment right now are bond yields, which continue to climb: +5.285% on the 10-year, +4.858 on the 2-year (higher than the 10-year was just three weeks ago) and +5.637% on the 30-year, which can be expected will keep mortgage rates elevated. If there is any good news here, the yield curve between 10s and 2s has gone back to 40 basis points (bps), rather inching toward sub-20 bps we were seeing just a few days ago.

Rather than spot oil prices on a day-to-day basis, the bond market more historically would look at bigger-picture issues, such as the war in Iran and whether it will be possible to wind down soon (unlikely until sometime after the midterms), and the subsequent results at the gas pump, including diesel fuel which is at record highs. We also have $40 trillion in debt on our books, with little or no appetite to slow spending from Capitol Hill.
 

Weekly Jobless Claims Remain Historically Low

As we saw with yesterday’s ADP ADP private-sector payroll report, today’s Initial Jobless Claims also posted an improvement from expectations. Headline 197K new jobless claims filed last week is down -3K from expectations, and -1K from last week’s upwardly revised totals, which were revised slightly higher. This is the third-straight sub-100K jobless claims report, indicating the economy is not only near full employment, but it is remaining steadily at these low levels.

Continuing Claims reached a new near-term low at 1.701 million this morning, -11K month over month and below the downwardly revised 1.712 million from the previous week. These remain near 60-year lows, where we’ve been three weeks straight. A year ago, these figures were between +1.92-1.96 million longer-term claims per week.

Perhaps simply incidentally, Uber UBER drivers recently reached its 10 million driver threshold for the first time. There is likely some element in the labor force which eschews collecting a paycheck for being out of work with employing one’s automobile in order to cover monthly bill payments. This number of Uber drivers has doubled in just over four years.
 

What to Expect After the Market Opens Today

We look for a few more economic reports after regular trading kicks off in a half an hour. September Manufacturing PMI for S&P and ISM are both expected to tick up this morning: +3.1% on the S&P print and +0.3 points for ISM. By the way, a +57 on S&P Manufacturing PMI would be the strongest read since March of 2022.

Construction Spending for August is expected to rebound somewhat from its lackluster -0.5% posted a month ago, with +0.1% expected this morning. This metric has not shown a positive month since April, and between October of last year and February 2026, Construction Spending was down for five straight months.

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