Weekly Jobless Claims Softer-Than-Expected

Pre-market futures are attempting to fight back from early morning lows at this hour, following better-than-expected Weekly Jobless Claims and Philly Fed data, along with a mixed bag of earnings reports out before the opening bell. The Dow is currently -294 points, -0.63%, the S&P 500 -43, -0.65%, the Nasdaq -181, -0.74%, and the small-cap Russell 2000 is -26 points, -1.05%.

Weekly Jobless Claims Remain Historically Excellent

Once again, Initial Jobless Claims came in below expectations for last week, to 205K from 215K estimated. This is the lowest figure we’ve seen since early January, which was the last time we were sub-200K. They follow an unrevised 213K from the previous week. These levels are consistent with a robust labor market, even though we understand it’s more of a “low hire/low fire” environment.

Continuing Claims came in at 1.857 million in this morning’s report — the 10th straight week below 1.9 million longer-term jobless claims, and down from the upwardly revised 1.860 million the prior week. In 2025, from April through mid-November we were between 1.89 and 1.975 million longer-term claims, without ever tipping the scales at the psychologically important 2 million continuing claims. And we’ve only gotten better since then.

Philly Fed Hits High Mark in 2026: 18.1

The March manufacturing survey known as Philly Fed posted its third-straight positive month, reaching 18.1 for the first time since September of last year. Not only that, but the past three months have been up double-digits, following three-straight months in negative territory. This is another metric that demonstrates the health of the American economy.

Earnings Reports This Morning: BABA, DRI & More

Meanwhile, we see shares of Alibaba BABA, the world’s largest business-to-business Internet platform based in Mainland China, falling -7% this morning. Earnings results for its December quarter were down -47% to $1.01 per share, even as its AI Cloud business gained +36% in the quarter. This compounds Alibaba’s losses year to date to around -15%.

Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse parent Darden Restaurants DRI, on the other hand, met earnings expectations exactly this morning when it reported $2.95 per share. Revenues came in slightly ahead of Zacks consensus to $3.35 billion, but rising gas prices are dimming the restaurant corporation’s outlook, and shares are down -4% in pre-market trading. 

One of the biggest winners this morning is Duluth Holdings DLTH, which is seeing a +21% surge in pre-market activity after whalloping estimates for Q4. Earnings of $0.23 per share beat $0.09 anticipated by an extraordinary +155.6%, while revenues of $215.9 million outperformed expectations by +2.61%. 

After today’s close, we’ll see fiscal Q3 earnings results from FedEx FDX. This company is a great gauge for global delivery, meaning it takes the temperature of overall consumer activity in ways most companies cannot. Expectations are for -8.2% earnings growth year over year on +6.45% revenues from the year-ago quarter. FedEx looks for its fourth-straight earnings beat, and shares are up +20% year to date.

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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