INITIAL JOBLESS CLAIMS UP 13K = NO SIGNS OF IMPROVEMENT

07/01/10 09:00AM EDT

Initial claims rose 13k  to 472k last week (15k net of the revision of last week's reading), nearly wiping out last week's improvement. This drove the rolling average up 3.25k to 466.75k, its highest level since March.  Overall, claims continued to track roughly in the 450-470k range they have occupied for the last six months.  For unemployment to materially improve, claims need to fall to the 375-400k range.  Other than extremely weak sentiment going into tomorrow's unemployment report, there don't seem to be any positive signals.  

INITIAL JOBLESS CLAIMS UP 13K = NO SIGNS OF IMPROVEMENT - rolling

Below the jobless claims charts, we show the correlations between initial claims and each of the 30 Financial Subsectors. To reiterate, Credit Card and Payment Processing companies show the strongest correlations to initial claims, with R-squared values of .62 and .72 over the last year, respectively.  Surprisingly, some subsectors show a positive correlation coefficient to initial claims - i.e. Financials that go up as unemployment claims go up.  These names are concentrated in the Pacific Northwest Banks and Construction Banks, though these correlations are usually not very high.  

In the table below, we found the correlation and R-squared of each company with initial claims, then took the average for each subsector.  For composition of the subsectors, see Chart 5 below.

INITIAL JOBLESS CLAIMS UP 13K = NO SIGNS OF IMPROVEMENT - init. claims subsector correlation analysis

The following table shows the most highly correlated stocks (both positively and negatively correlated) with initial claims. Note that the top 15 negatively correlated stocks have a much stronger correlation on average than the top 15 positively correlated stocks - as you would expect, given that most of the Financial space is pro-cyclical. 

INITIAL JOBLESS CLAIMS UP 13K = NO SIGNS OF IMPROVEMENT - init. claims company correlation analysis

Astute investors will note that in some cases the R-squared doesn't seem to reconcile with the square of the correlation coefficient. This is a result of finding the correlation and then averaging. For example, Pacific Northwest Banks have an average correlation coefficient of .32 and an average R-squared of .52 (with CACB, CTBK, FTBK, and STSA strongly positively correlated and UMPQ strongly negatively correlated). The different directions have the effect of canceling out each other out when finding the average correlation coefficient, but do not cancel out when finding the average R-squared. 

Below we chart the raw claims data. 

INITIAL JOBLESS CLAIMS UP 13K = NO SIGNS OF IMPROVEMENT - raw

The table below shows the stock performance of each subsector over four durations. 

INITIAL JOBLESS CLAIMS UP 13K = NO SIGNS OF IMPROVEMENT - stock price perf chart

As a reminder, May was the peak month of Census hiring, and it should now be a headwind to jobs from here as the Census winds down.

INITIAL JOBLESS CLAIMS UP 13K = NO SIGNS OF IMPROVEMENT - census chart

Joshua Steiner, CFA

Allison Kaptur

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