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As we comb the last pieces of confetti out of our hair and wipe the sleep from our eyes, we re-enter stock market activity for the first time in 2025 this morning. It’s not a barren landscape, either: we see new economic reads on weekly employment data.
Ahead of these numbers, the Dow was +310 points, the S&P 500 +45 and the Nasdaq +205 points. This will hopefully lead to a bounce-back from a weak December, where only the Nasdaq finished marginally in the green; the Dow lost -4.5% last month and the small-cap Russell 2000 dumped nearly -8%.
Weekly Jobless Claims Remain Tame: 211K, 1.84M
It’s good news on the labor market front to start the new year, with Weekly Jobless Claims once again behaving themselves on behalf of the economy writ large: 211K Initial Jobless Claims were filed last week, below the 225K expected and the slightly upwardly revised 220K from the previous week. This is also well below the early-October print of 260K we saw, which currently looks more and more like an outlier.
Continuing Jobless Claims drifted downward week over week, to 1.844 million — the lowest weekly number since September of last year, and notably lower than the previous week’s downwardly-revised 1.896 million. This takes us beneath the 1.9 million threshold yet again; several times over the past few months we’d seen an initial longer-term jobless claims number at or above 1.9 million, only to be revised lower the following week. Only the first half of November contained a week above this figure.
One important note about these jobless claims numbers: we’re looking at the yearly holiday period. With vacation days taken and right-sizing decisions put off until after the new year, we’re probably a couple weeks away from having a clear picture on week-by-week employment levels. And the fact of the matter is we are way up from the lows in jobless claims we were seeing a couple years ago; it’s unclear when we may return to those ranges, if we ever do.
Tesla Posts 1st Decline in Yearly Deliveries
Just announced less than a half hour before today’s opening bell, Tesla TSLA has reported vehicle deliveries numbers beneath expectations. A total of 495,570 vehicles were reported to have been delivered, lower than the 504,770 expected. This puts 2024 deliveries numbers for Tesla below that of 2023 — the first time since the auto industry was bailed out by the U.S. government.
Shares are down -3% on the news, but that’s not likely troubling most TSLA owners this morning. The stock is still +13% over the past month, +55% since the General Election in November. We already know CEO Elon Musk has an uncommon level of influence on the incoming administration; thus, we can see Tesla’s fortunes are likely to be impacted by bigger things than vehicle delivery numbers.