"Jobs Week" Continues Thursday to Close Out the Week

Wednesday, July 2, 2025

Market indexes were almost complete up today, with only the Dow posting a -0.02% loss from yesterday’s close, -10 points. The Nasdaq grew another +0.94% on the session and the S&P 500 split the difference: +0.47%. The small-cap Russell 2000 outpaced the field, +1.30% for the day. It’s still playing catchup with the other indexes, which are all +13% over the past month.

We started today’s pre-market in the red following the worst private-sector payroll report from ADP ADP in more than two years, but that can cut both ways. While it’s never a good thing for the economy to see negative employment numbers, if, for instance, we see nonfarm payrolls from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) also come in negative tomorrow, that will be the biggest sign in a long time that the Fed is ready to cut interest rates for the first time this year.

There’s no guarantee this will happen. For one thing, ADP and BLS numbers rarely match up exactly in real time (although subsequent revisions pull them closer together), and as we talk about below, we’re currently expecting north of 100K new jobs for June having been filled. For another, depending on what windfalls come from the tax bill passing or inflation from pending tariff policy, it may be the Fed remains reluctant to make any moves at all.

What to Expect from the Stock Market Tomorrow

Thursday is our final trading day of the week, as Friday is July 4th — Independence Day.  Thus, what would normally be released on Friday morning — particularly the Employment Situation report from the BLS — will come out Thursday morning instead.

Therefore, both Weekly Jobless Claims and the BLS report will hit the wires around the same time tomorrow — an hour before the market opens. And there is a lot at stake, particularly after today’s negative private-sector payroll report from ADP. We’ve begun to see some weakness in both of these metrics recently, most pointedly in Continuing Jobless Claims, which have crept up toward 2 million per week.

Initial Jobless Claims of 240K would be back up higher than the prior week’s 236K, but still lower than the 250K touched four weeks ago. Longer-term claims are the highest we’ve seen since November of 2021, when they were going very much in the opposite direction after the Covid pandemic wreaked (temporary) havoc on the U.S. workforce.

Nonfarm payrolls via the BLS are anticipated to reach triple digits, but not by all that much: 110K. We’ve been range-bound all 2025 so far between 100K-150K, and that looks unlikely to change. The Unemployment Rate is expected to tick up slightly to 4.3% from 4.2%, where it’s been the past three months. Wages are expected to moderate month over month but remain steady at +3.9% year over year.

Beyond these jobs numbers, we’ll also see final Services results for ISM and S&P PMI, a fresh U.S. Trade Deficit and Factory Orders. We’ll also be keeping an eye on Capitol Hill as the House tries to push through President Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill,” and take note of any trade deals that may transpire ahead of the tariff-freeze expiration next week.

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