The Biden administration has been warning for days: The jobs report, due out before the bell today, won’t be pretty.
The number to watch: Economists forecast U.S. employers created about 175,000 new jobs last month. Some, though, are warning it could be far worse.
“With everything that is going on, especially the number of people who have the Omicron variant and are presumably not at work, that would be a great result. Unfortunately, the real number is likely to be well below that and will probably be negative—maybe significantly so,” said Brad McMillan, chief investment officer for Commonwealth Financial Network in Waltham, Mass.
That uncertainty is not slowing down tech bulls, though. At 6 a.m. ET, Nasdaq futures were 0.8% higher, clawing back some of yesterday’s losses. Speaking of ugly…the tech-heavy exchange tumbled 3.7% on Thursday, battered by the sinking fortunes of former high-fliers such as Meta, Spotify, and PayPal.
On Wednesday after the bell, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta delivered a huge miss on profits and new users, wiping out more than $200 billion in market cap, and triggering a massive selloff in tech stocks.
Meta futures, though, are rebounding too on Friday, helped by fellow FAANG stock Amazon.
Unlike Meta, the e-commerce giant dazzled the markets with a big profits beat yesterday, and investors cheered the news it’s hiking its annual Prime subscription price by 20 bucks a year. In premarket, Amazon futures were up nearly 12%, more than making up for Thursday’s miserable performance when shares cratered by nearly 8%.
The stock to keep an eye on today is Snap, owners of social media platform Snapchat. Snap bulls are driving up the share price premarket. At one point on Friday morning, futures contracts were trading at a 50% premium to Thursday’s close after the company reported knockout earnings.
Check out this Fortune must-read: “Why Wall Street thinks the metaverse will be worth trillions”