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Market indexes turned around minutes ahead of today’s opening bell when, while addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos this morning, President Trump ruled out the use of military force to annex Greenland for the U.S. Once those words fell from his lips, the Dow gained +200 points within seconds.

Then, right around 2:30 pm ET, when Trump posted that he had reached a deal with the Secretary General of NATO to not slap February 1st tariffs on countries opposed to the U.S. annexation of Greenland in exchange for a Golden Dome defense shield deal for the country owned by Denmark, market indexes rallied again. We close off intra-day highs, but the Dow finished +588 points, +1.21%, the S&P 500 +78 points, +1.16% and the Nasdaq +270 points, +1.18%. The small-cap Russell 2000 took high honors today, +52 points or +2.00%.

That “risk off” switch that was flipped a day or two ago has now been flipped back the other way. Q4 earnings season has mostly been favorable, and economic reports coming up Thursday morning are anticipated to depict an overall healthy, if not outright robust, economy.

What to Expect from the Stock Market Thursday
 

With this Greenland/NATO/Davos issue behind us, we can once again focus on things like inflation numbers. The delayed Personal Consumption Expenditures (PCE) report for November will be posted ahead of tomorrow’s opening bell, with expectations for a still-warm but flattening-out +2.8% year-over-year rate on both headline and core. Meanwhile, the first revision to Q3 GDP (also delayed) is expected to be in-line with the initial print, +4.3%. 

Thus, sub-3% inflation and over +4% productivity is a recipe for a strengthening economy. Again, we caution these numbers are a couple months out of date at this stage, so they are essentially backward-looking reports. December PCE had initially been scheduled for this Friday, but clearly that will need some more time to hit the tape.

Further, Weekly Jobless Claims come out, like almost every Thursday morning, and are expected to once again be somewhere around the +200K level on Initial Claims, which is also a strong print. Continuing Claims had sunk to sub-1.9 million over the past few weeks after half a year or so between 1.91-1.975 million longer-term jobless claims. All of these figures are consistent with a labor market holding its own in the current economy.

For earnings, Thursday is also the biggest day of the week. Ahead of the open, GE Aerospace (GE - Free Report), Abbott Labs (ABT - Free Report) and Procter & Gamble (PG - Free Report) come out, while Intel (INTC - Free Report , railroad major CSX (CSX - Free Report) and medical devices maker Intuitive Surgical (ISRG - Free Report) report after the close. Of these, only Abbott and Intuitive have Buy recommendations, while P&G and CSX are currently Zacks Rank #4 (Sell).

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