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Briefing.com Summary:
*Taiwan Semiconductor energized the AI trade with its earnings report and outlook.
*Weekly initial jobless claims tracked below 200,000 for the week ending January 10.
*Earnings reports from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and BlackRock have been met with tepid reactions.
There is a sense of 2025 normalcy in today's market—or at least that seems to be the case ahead of the open. To wit: mega-cap stocks and the AI trade are upside drivers, oil prices are down, weekly initial jobless claims are remarkably low, and the president has clarified that he is not going to fire Fed Chair Powell.
Another 2025 feature is that the market cap-weighted S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 look poised to outperform when the opening bell rings.
Currently, the S&P 500 futures are up 32 points and are trading 0.5% above fair value, the Nasdaq 100 futures are up 264 points and are trading 1.1% above fair value, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average futures are down 33 points and are trading 0.1% below fair value.
The primary catalyst for the current disposition isn't even a US-based company. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSM) got the market's heart pumping with an earnings report that checked all the AI boxes, such as robust revenue growth, talk of strong demand and tight capacity, and an upsized capital expenditures forecast for 2026 of $52-56 billion versus $40.9 billion in 2025.
This encouraging news has given an added boost to a host of semiconductor and semiconductor equipment stocks, as well as residual AI plays. It has dwarfed the earnings results from Goldman Sachs (GS), Morgan Stanley (MS), and BlackRock (BLK) that have been met with tepid reactions.
That wasn't the case for this morning's economic data, which featured better-than-expected and expansionary prints for the January Philadelphia Fed Index and January Empire State Manufacturing Survey, a negligible 0.1% year-over-year increase in import prices in November, and an initial jobless claims reading below 200,000.
Specifically, initial jobless claims for the week ending January 10 decreased by 9,000 to 198,000 (Briefing.com consensus: 210,000). Continuing jobless claims for the week ending January 3 decreased by 19,000 to 1.884 million.
The key takeaway from the report is that it corroborates a low firing-low hiring environment that will keep the Fed on watch but also on hold in terms of a rate cut this month and possibly until June, which is when the fed funds futures market is projecting the first cut in 2026.
The 2-yr note yield is up four basis points to 3.55%, and the 10-yr note yield is up one basis point to 4.15%, staying true to the relatively low rates that prevailed in 2025.
