The market sell-off many had expected following the Brussels Airport terror bombing Tuesday didn’t occur til Wednesday, and now the S&P 500 has again swung to the negative year to date. Futures for the Dow, Nasdaq and S&P ahead of the bell this morning are also down this morning.
So it’s less of a continued bull-run and more of a bunny hop. Fitting, as this Sunday is the Easter holiday, and U.S. markets are closed tomorrow for observation of Good Friday. It’s a shortened week basically between earnings season, even though there were a few notable companies to have brought out earnings results this week.
Being a Thursday, we saw a new installation of Initial Jobless Claims and Continuing Claims this morning: 265K initial claims rose 6,000 from the week-earlier’s revised 259K. 2.18 million continuing claims is lower than a week ago. Keeping within range on both levels, and both in relatively positive territory for the U.S. economy.
Durable Goods for February were also reported early today, -2.8 percent, which is inline with expectations. The January read was revised down to +4.2 percent (from 4.7 percent), so we obviously see some turbulence month over month for this read — or, another bunny-hop, if you will. Ex-Transportation, this number rises to -1 percent, and ex-Defense -1.9 percent. The read for Shipments fell -1.1 percent.
Tomorrow, even though both the U.S. markets and Zacks Investment Research will be closed for the holiday, the third revision to Q4 GDP is expected. The second estimate, posted a month ago, was revised higher from the initial read to 1.0 percent, though this remains far below the previous two quarters of 3.9 percent and 2.0 percent growth in Q2 and Q3, respectively. Crashing oil prices from the beginning of the year was the main culprit, and not much is expected to wash that away on the third read.
Yahoo (YHOO – Analyst Report) is under boardroom revolt currently — a proxy fight begun by activist hedge fund Starboard, a main investor of YHOO shares (1.7 percent ownership), which is proposing a complete cleaning house on its board of directors. Starboard wants to swap out all 9 members on Yahoo’s board, publicly expressing regret for it coming to this, but decrying the company’s “dismal financial performance, poor management execution, egregious compensation and hiring practices, and general lack of accountability and oversight.” Stay tuned.
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