Tuesday, September 2, 2025
It was a noisy day where market participants fought conflicting impulses today. Is U.S. tariff policy illegal? What will happen to the already collected revenues if it is? Stock markets sold on this new “risk off” attitude, booking profits made most of the way through the month of August. We kick off the historically weak trading month of September with the Dow closing -0.55%, the S&P 500 -0.69% and the Nasdaq -0.60%.
Goldman Sachs GS was the worst-performing stock on the Dow index today, -1.9% while Kraft Heinz KHC fell -7%, the biggest loser in today’s S&P 500. Gold prices have reached a new all-time high today, +2.35% to a hair below $3600 per ounce. Bitcoin grew another +1.88% on the session, now at 111,313 in U.S. dollars.
Zscaler Beats & Raises in Q4, Shares Jump
Cloud security firm Zscaler ZS posted fiscal Q4 results after today’s close, beating estimates soundly on both top and bottom lines: earnings of 89 cents per share beat the Zacks consensus by 9 cents on $719 million in quarterly sales — beating the $706 million analysts were expecting. Billings came in notably higher than expected, and guidance for both next quarter and the full fiscal year have also been ratcheted up. Shares are up +5% in late trading.
Econ Reports Out Today: Manufacturing, Consumer Spending
Earlier today, we saw a few economic metrics hit the tape, including S&P Manufacturing PMI and ISM Manufacturing, both for the month of August. Results were subtly mixed between the two reports, with S&P coming in slightly below expectations at +53.0, down -30 basis points (bps) from the prior month, and up +20 bps on ISM from estimates, to +48.7%, and 70 bps above the month-ago tally. We still see ISM Manufacturing sub-50%, however — this demonstrates it is still in slight contraction mode. S&P Manufacturing remained above 50.
Construction Spending for July improved month over month, from -0.4% in June to -0.1% in this morning’s print, though still 10 bps below expectations. It’s now been 12 months since we last saw a positive Construction Spending report. Amusement and Recreation dropped by the sharpest level: -1.0%. Single-family housing construction was up +0.1% for the month.
What to Expect from the Stock Market Tomorrow
We’ll see the first Jobs Week report ahead of Wednesday’s opening bell: the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) for July is expected to remain in-line with the previous month at 7.4 million job openings. This is within the range we’ve seen going back to late 2024, and is consistent with the overall “no hire/no fire” labor market that we’ve seen in other labor numbers.
Factory Orders, also for July, are also reporting tomorrow ahead of the open, improving to -1.3% from -4.8% reported for June. We’ll also see an August Beige Book from the BLS at 2pm ET Wednesday, and August Auto Sales are expected to be released throughout the day.
Even though Q2 earnings season is basically over, this week we’ll see a few important names coming out with quarterly numbers. After the close tomorrow, Salesforce CRM is expected to find +8.2% earnings per share growth in the quarter, +8.7% on revenues. The cloud-based play has only missed on earnings once in the past five years.
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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.
