Archive Category: Andrew Zatlin's Superforecast Trader Archive

Hello, it’s Matt Clark here. Another short week is upon us as the Fourth of July holiday begins on Friday. It means another long weekend for markets as all major exchanges will close at 1 p.m. on Thursday and remain closed until Monday morning. Additionally, Andrew is currently at West Point, taking his son Ari to his first year at the United States Military Academy. We certainly wish Ari all the best as he embarks on this new journey, and Andrew will return next Tuesday.

Ever since DOGE laid off thousands of workers earlier this year, Wall Street has been waiting for unemployment claims to start ticking up. But as I’ve explained time and time again, the vast majority of these employees were given severance packages — effectively extending their employment out another 90 days, through the end of May. Well, May is over. And as of last week, we’ve finally started to see layoffs tick up.

Welcome to another Thursday edition of Superforecast Trader. Well, as I predicted, the run-up to the Memorial Day holiday pushed weekly jobless claims up this week. After three consecutive prints near the 220,000 to 230,000, claims jumped 14,000 to 240,000 last week.

There’s an interesting rule of thumb in labor markets — that jobless claims tend to jump during weeks that follow a three-day holiday weekend (like Memorial Day).
So for this week’s video, I wanted to share an explanation on why that happens … and why the consensus is still underestimating this week’s coming spike in claims.

Welcome to the Thursday edition of Andrew Zatlin’s Superforecast Trader. Andrew is on his way back from his vacation in Japan, so I will go over all the numbers today. And, those numbers don’t seem like anything out of the ordinary … at least not at first glance: