The U.S. Labor Department is out with its weekly jobless claims. The past week’s report rose by 5,000 to 333,000. The Dow Jones and Bloomberg estimates called for claims to come in at 335,000, making this small uptick less than expected. We also saw that last week’s report was revised upward to 328,000 from a preliminary report of 326,000.

Another metric to watch is the four-week average, and this fell by 6,250 claims to 335,500. The army of unemployed, or the continuing jobless claims (reported with a one week lag), actually rose by 67,000 to 3,018,000 claims.

This continuing claims needs to be watched even it has a one week lag. This reversed two drops, but what stands out more is that it went above the 3 million mark again.

Today’s report is likely to be a market neutral report, not causing waves in either direction. The stock market has seen three days worth of selling based on rationalizing a tapering of bond purchases from the Federal Reserve. We currently have S&P 500 futures up about six points and DJIA futures up about 60 points.

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