Archive Category: Andrew Zatlin's Superforecast Trader Archive

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…

Winter storms that covered a majority of the country played a major role in weekly jobless claims. The latest figures out today show a significant spike in the number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits.