Below is the breakdown of this morning's claims data from the Hedgeye Financials team. If you would like to setup a call with Josh or Jonathan or trial their research, please contact .
A Steadily Widening Divergence
This past week's claims data looks almost identical to that of the prior week. Rolling NSA claims were better by 9.6% YoY, which was a hair better than the 9.5% improvement in the previous week. SA claims were better WoW but essentially flat on a rolling basis. Clearly all eyes are on the Friday payrolls report. Historically the ability to forecast NFP with claims has been poor, i.e. there's typically a high correlation but with a fairly high standard error. Nevertheless, the 4-wk print (SA) this week was 346.5k, which was actually down from the 4-wk print for May at 352.5k. Based on this and last month's NSA print of 175k and this month's consensus of 161k, we'll go out on a limb and suggest that there's a better than 50% chance the NFP print will come in nominally ahead of expectations.
Tactically thinking about the Friday number aside, the real takeaway is that the fundamentals of the labor market (NSA YoY) continue to improve at an accelerating rate. Deep value, credit quality-levered longs like BAC remain among our top picks on this basis, coupled with the fact the recovering housing market shows no signs of derailing on the recent back-up in rates.
The Data
Prior to revision, initial jobless claims fell 3k to 343k from 346k WoW, as the prior week's number was revised up by 2k to 348k.
The headline (unrevised) number shows claims were lower by 5k WoW. Meanwhile, the 4-week rolling average of seasonally-adjusted claims fell -0.75k WoW to 346.5k.
The 4-week rolling average of NSA claims, which we consider a more accurate representation of the underlying labor market trend, was -9.6% lower YoY, which is a sequential improvement versus the previous week's YoY change of -9.5%
Joshua Steiner, CFA
Jonathan Casteleyn, CFA, CMT
