Market comments for Aug. 26th

Well the Initial Jobless Claims number came in at 473K this week. Expectations were for 475K, so they came in as expected. As El-Erian, Co CEO of Pimco said this morning on CNBC, "The number is as was expected but it isn't a good number." The prior week was revised up from 500K to 504K. Continuing Claims came in at 4.456 Million vs an expectation of 4.500 Million. The prior week was revised up from 4.478 Million to 4.518 Million. But look at this Bloomberg.com headline on the results: "Jobless Claims in U.S. Decline More Than Economists Estimated to 473,000." Gee that's only 2K shy of what they expected and well within rounding error given they revised the previous week up 4K. So as far as I am concerned it came in as expected. But this title is meant to make people feel things are getting better. Unbelievable!

Tomorrow at 5:30am PST, the Q2 initial GDP estimate will be reported. Expectations are for 1.3%. Prior Quarter was 2.4%, so we will see what they think as to how much the 2nd quarter started to slow down. This is an easy number to manipulate because all it is a a bunch of guesses and extrapolations. We won't know for a few months what it really came in as. Also tomorrow in Univ. of Michigan Consumer Sentiment, which will be released at 6:55am PST or 9:55am EST.

Dow Futures are up 38 points in pre-market so the reaction looks muted to the Jobless Claims and actually may give some relief to the market today. European markets are up almost 1% today. And the Nikkei was up about 60 points in overnight trading but it did not climb back up over 9,000. It closed at 8,906. Gold is down only $1.00 this morning. I would expect it to drop a little more with the market ready to rise some.

There are only 4 trading days left in August.