Stocks looked set to fall on Thursday, as jitters lingered from the previous session’s selloff during which two of the three major indexes posted their first losses of 2026.
Futures tracking the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 142 points, or 0.3%, and contracts tied to the S&P 500 slipped 0.2%. Nasdaq 100 futures were down 0.3%. The Dow and the S&P 500 closed lower on Wednesday after comments from President Donald Trump rattled homebuilder and defense stocks.
Investors may have shrugged off geopolitical tensions tied to Venezuela and Greenland at the start of this year, but they still care as much as ever about the economy, meaning Thursday’s initial jobless claims data could move the market.
Economists polled by FactSet are forecasting the number of Americans who filed for unemployment for the first time climbed to 208,000 over the week ended Jan. 3. The figures matter because they could help determine how much scope the Federal Reserve has to cut interest rates in early 2026.
“A stabilising labour market puts less pressure on the Fed to take a knife to rates, but the political will to do so remains ever present,” wrote Hargreaves Lansdown’s head of equity research Derren Nathan. He added that inflation is “the elephant in the room” because the government shutdown delayed price data.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury note was flat at 4.16% on Thursday. The dollar climbed 0.1% against a weighted basket of its peers.
Precious metals continued to rack up losses: Gold futures slipped 0.7% to $4,430 an ounce, and silver futures were down 3.1% to $75.22 an ounce. Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by total market value, was down 2.5% to $90,285 over the past 24 hours.