Archive Category: Andrew Zatlin's Superforecast Trader Archive

Hello and welcome back to Superforecast Trader! Jobless claims are still reeling, showing the last signs of distortion from our recent winter storm — which kept Americans bundled up at home instead of heading out to claim unemployment. But while this small seasonal distortion finally winds down, we’re also seeing the formation of a “new normal” that could see regular jobless claims clocking in at just 200,000 per week instead of the current run rate of 220,000.

We’re one step closer to finding out if the U.S. labor market is stabilizing, or whether the numbers we’ve been seeing are just temporary… In today’s weekly jobless claims report, applications for unemployment benefits only increased by 4,000 to 212,000 for the week ending February 21.

Hello and welcome back to Superforecast Trader! These past few weeks have been an absolute rollercoaster for anyone tracking jobless claims data… First, we had several consecutive weeks of sustained high jobless claims. The data pointed to some 45,000 more Americans out of work than expected over the course of just three weeks.

Hello, and welcome to your Thursday Superforecast Trader update! Matt Clark is taking some well-earned vacation time to visit with his family in Kansas this week, so this will be a brief one… In our last update this Tuesday, I explained how jobless claims data can often be distorted in its interpretation — with things like seasonal adjustments serving to skew claims higher or lower than they should be.

45,000. In each of the last three weeks, jobless claims have exceeded expectations — leading to 45,000 more Americans losing their jobs than we might have expected. That’s a big number. And this new data clearly has some investors worried…