The U.S. jobs report will clearly dominate the day ahead for markets, with a gain of 110,000 jobs expected for last month. The report will be released on Thursday at 8:30 a.m. EDT.
Market Trends
Despite the expected job gain, there has been a pullback in red-hot chip stocks around the world as the second half of the year gets underway. The U.S. SOX chip index fell back about 6% on Wednesday with no obvious trigger.
Asia stocks took their lead from the SOX today, with sizeable declines in big chip and tech equipment makers in Seoul and Tokyo. Meta, which had lost about 15% in the first half of the year, was an outlier stateside, rising nearly 9% on Wednesday on a report that it was building out its cloud business and planned to sell excess AI computing capacity.
Fed Chair Kevin Warsh was equivocal in his take on things in Portugal on Wednesday, insisting the central bank was committed to getting inflation back to 2% but noting there had been improvement in the inflation picture in recent weeks.
Original reporting: Appleton, WI News Feed (HLL/CB) — read the source article.
