Friday, August 3, 2018
What to watch today
The main event Friday will be the jobs report, which is expected to show 192,000 jobs were created in July, extending the strong run of readings on the U.S. economy seen over the last couple weeks.
This jobs report will follow last week’s GDP report for the second quarter which showed the economy grew at an annualized pace of 4.1% and a glowing assessment of the economy from the Federal Reserve in its policy statement released Wednesday. Investors will also get the June reading on the trade balance and two updates on service sector activity in July.
Top news
(Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)
CBS execs refuse to answer questions about alleged sexual harassment: CBS chairman and CEO Les Moonves joined the media giant’s second-quarter earnings call with analysts on Thursday, but would not take questions about the sexual harassment allegations made against him. CBS reported second-quarter earnings of $1.12 per share, beating analysts’ expectations of $1.11. Shares of CBS (CBS) have dropped nearly 9% since the news broke. [Yahoo Finance]
Apple is worth $1 trillion: At about 11:48 a.m. ET, Apple (AAPL) became the first U.S.-listed company to be worth $1,000,000,000,000.00. The price of a single share of Apple crossed $207.0425. Multiply that by 4,829,926,000 shares outstanding and you get a trillion bucks. Some might argue that $1 trillion is just a random round number. But whether it’s a trillion or $999 billion, the point is that Apple is an incredibly massive company, with an incredible reach, and with an incredible amount of profits. [Yahoo Finance]
Exclusive: Walmart unveils grocery-picking robots in test store: Walmart (WMT), the world’s largest seller of groceries, will begin piloting a robotics system for its fast-growing online grocery pickup (OGP) service in one of its stores. The retailer has teamed up with Massachusetts-based Alert Innovation to deploy its Alphabot, a first-of-its-kind technology, in its Supercenter store in Salem, New Hampshire just off of Interstate 93. [Yahoo Finance]
Trump proposes car-mileage rollback: Citing safety, the Trump administration on Thursday proposed rolling back car-mileage standards, backing away from years of government efforts to cut Americans’ trips to the gas station and reduce unhealthy, climate-changing tailpipe emissions. [AP]
Wireless speaker pioneer Sonos jumps in debut: Shares of Sonos Inc. (SONO) rose as much as 34% to $20.20 in their market debut on Thursday, at which the U.S. wireless audio systems maker has a market value of nearly $1.9 billion. [Reuters]