Pre-market futures have dipped into the red at this hour, following a strong trading day Monday to kick off our holiday-shortened trading week. We rose anywhere from +0.6% (Dow) to +2.1% (Nasdaq) yesterday, and an early morning rollback appears to coming not based on any particular news item, but perhaps as a near-term balancing act as the AI trade appears to have been reignited.
That said, we’re concluding calendar Q2 up strongly overall. In fact, we’re about to tie a bow on the best first-half year of trading since 2021. It’s the best quarter for the Nasdaq and the S&P since 2000. Micron (MU), Seagate Technology (STX) and Dell (DELL) have never had better quarters; AMD (AMD) is one session from posting its best trading month in over 50 years!
Case-Shiller Home Prices
Considered the most accurate index on domestic home prices, the Case-Shiller index each month brings data from two months ago. This morning, April Case-Shiller numbers on the 20-city index rose +1.1% month over month, up slightly from the upwardly revised +0.9% for March.
Mortgage rates in April moved moderately between +5.99-6.25% — no longer at prohibitively peak levels, but still higher than many analysts had surmised would be the case by now. Leaders in home price value were once again Chicago (+6.5%), New York City (+3.8%) and Cleveland (+3.2%), continuing the pilgrimage back to northern cities. Seattle — for years one of the top gainers in home value — led the slide lower, -2.3%.
JOLTS Report for May Kicks Off “Jobs Week”
At 10am ET this morning, the first report on “Jobs Week” comes out: Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), for a month in arrears (May) fro the other jobs reports due this week. For JOLTS, we’ve seen a dearth of job openings overall, contributing to the trough-like levels we’ve been in since early 2024. Analysts expect 7.3 million openings, down from the 7.6 million reported the previous month.
For a little perspective, we had over 12 million job openings at the peak of the Great Reopening, following the Covid pandemic, back in March of 2022 (a couple months before the Fed finally began raising interest rates). We can tell a lot about job security from the JOLTS report, perhaps nowhere more clearly than in the Job Quits rate, which remained low at 3.0 million in the last report.
Jobs Week continues Wednesday morning with private-sector payrolls from Automatic Data Processing (ADP), where analysts expect a slight drawdown to +110K new jobs filled, from +122K the prior month. Weekly Jobless Claims and the Employment Situation report greet us Thursday ahead of the opening bell. These numbers are expected to slide back month over month, as well: +118K from +172K reported for May.
Conference Board Reports Due: Consumer Confidence, Present Situation
Also after today’s open, the Conference Board brings us June Consumer Confidence numbers. These are expected to tick up slightly, from 93.1 last time to 94.6 today, which sound pretty good until you see in the graph that we’ve been wallowing at 10-year lows (not counting Covid). The Present Situation index — a view of opinions on business conditions — dipped -2.8 points in the May report to +1.4%: low, but still positive.
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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.
