By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- U.S. stock markets opened higher on Thursday as fresh data from the labor market bolstered hopes that the economy is coming out of a Covid-19-induced hibernation.
The Labor Department said initial jobless claims fell to their lowest level since the start of the pandemic last week - albeit the absolute level of 712,000 remains close to unimaginable for the time before Covid.
By 9:45 AM ET (1445 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 144 points, or 0.5%, at a new record high of 32,441 points. The S&P 500 was up 0.7% and the Nasdaq Composite was outperforming again with a rise of 1.6%.
The data "strongly suggest that any temporary job losses triggered by last month’s huge winter storm have been more than offset by a decline in the underlying trend," said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist with Pantheon Macroeconomics in emailed comments. "This, in turn, has been triggered by the gradual re-opening now underway across the country."
Shepherdson said he expects the weekly initial claims figure to fall to below 500,000 by Memorial Day.
Gains were consistently spread around the tech-themed megacaps which had slid increasingly sharply as the market began to push long-term interest rates higher over recent months. Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) stock was up 1.4%, amid news that it had begun production of the iPhone 12 in India, while Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) stock was up 1.4%, helped by a report suggesting that EU antitrust regulators are struggling to make their most recent antitrust charges against the e-commerce giant stick.
The ‘gamma squeeze’ on GameStop (NYSE:GME) stock appeared to ease a little, although the stock still swung from a premarket loss to a gain of 2.1% in early trading. The second spike has caused most pain not for short-selling hedge funds, who largely closed out their positions during January’s squeeze, but rather options brokers having to cover themselves in the cash market, having sold a welter of call options in recent days.
Among the few losers in early trade was Oracle stock (NYSE:ORCL), which fell 8.7% after a quarterly update that disappointed on more than one level after the close on Thursday. Not only did the software maker’s revenue guidance fall short of expectations, but it also failed to confirm that it had transferred some of its cash balances into Bitcoin.