We start a new trading day this Thursday morning with a pre-market release of
Initial Jobless Claims
: 184K represents a new post-Covid low, beating the 194K posted two weeks ago (the week of Thanksgiving, putting the claims report a day ahead of schedule) and -43K fewer new jobless claims from the upwardly revised 227K headline last week. This is also about half the number of initial claims we were seeing just 10 weeks ago.
The four-week moving average is also down to a post-Covid low, 218.75K. These numbers are all seasonally adjusted, however; non-seasonally adjusted initial claims came in at 281K. The states with the most noteworthy levels of new claims are California (9.8K), Texas (8.0K) and New York (7.9K). These also happen to be three of the four most populous states in the U.S.
Continuing Claims
— reported a week in arrears from initial claims — bounced up from its own post-Covid low last week to 1.992 million longer-term jobless claims. Nevertheless, it is the second-straight week beneath 2 million continuing claims, and back toward longer-term jobless claims we’d grown used to seeing prior to the coronavirus pandemic, which led to the wide shutdown back in March of 2020. That post-Covid low has now been revised down to 1.954 million — within striking distance next week, if initial claims this morning are any indicator.
If
Apple
AAPL
bids up another $8 per share or so today, it will have achieved an historic milestone: the first company with a market capitalization of $3 trillion, with a “t.” The share price on the Zacks Rank #3 (Hold)-rated tech behemoth would have to get to $182.86 in order to have mathematically reached this milestone. Apple was also the first company to reach $2 trillion in market cap, which has only been reached by
Microsoft
MSFT
and, for a short time,
Alphabet
GOOGL
. Apple has grown an outstanding +16% in just the last month alone, +35% year to date. And the company has just been named a top investment for 2022 by Morgan Stanley.
Markets are giving up a bit of their big gains ahead of today’s opening bell, but by slimmer margins than earlier this morning. The Dow is currently -110 points, the Nasdaq -50 and the S&P 500 -12 points. Having priced in vaccines and antivirals putting the Omicron variant in its place — although there is plenty we do not yet know about this new Covid strain — investors are skimming a bot off the top, back near all-time highs.
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