Rally in Oracle lifts big tech sector on investors digest easing inflation pressures. Here with more on the trading day takeaways. We got Yahoo Finance's Josh Shafer, Josh.

Hey Josh, yeah, we had the S&P 500 closing at its highest level since February 20th today. That was just one day after we had our last record high on February 19th. So we're getting close, but I want to highlight some economic data from this morning because this was pretty interesting. We've been watching this weekly claims data for a while now, right? This is kind of the number one thing, weekly unemployment claims, that when we ask economists on air Josh, what are you worried about? What are you watching? How do we know if that slowdown's coming? They always talk about claims, right? And this is part of the claims data set, but a little bit different. So this isn't initial jobless claims. This is continuing jobless claims. So people that can't continuously or not finding a new job, right? You saw that move up to its highest level since November 2021 over 1.9 million claims. Essentially, what this is telling us is a story we've been talking about a lot of course, it's taking longer

for people to find jobs right now. Hiring is slowing overall broadly in the labor market. And so right now, if you are out of a job, people are taking a little bit longer to find and find one.

If you look at this labor market data, Josh, and you know, against long-term averages, would you look at that data and say, okay, there's there's this data is screaming for J. Powell and our central bankers to cut.

It's certainly not screaming, right? And you've seen claims higher than this before and higher than this when the economy was maybe okay. What the issue is is sort of the rate of change story, right? We're starting to move higher. And so Renaissance Macro's head of economics, Neil Neil Dullo was pointing out as you start to move higher, what normally comes with that, a higher unemployment rate, right? And so if you if claims keep moving up, then you're worried about that unemployment rate going up, you're worried about the overall health of the labor market. So it's just something that right now it's kind of I'll I'll go yellow sign, right? It's a little bit of a yellow flag, we're not at red flag status here, red light panic, but it's certainly something that we're going to keep following. All right, Shafer, number two.

Yeah, so this is something I'm writing about for our morning brief newsletter tomorrow, Josh. Just the overall broadening that we've seen in the market this year. We're almost six months into 2025. Take a look at this chart from Richard Bernstein at Richard Bernstein Advisors. What we're looking at is the percent of stocks in the S&P 500 that are outperforming the index. You can see the last two years when we kept on talking about mag 7, mag 7, all not a lot of stocks were beating the market. Only 30% of stocks were. Well, this year, big move up. You're at about 45% as of earlier this morning when I was checking the data. But what this is sort of telling us is broadly in the market, there's just more going on. There's more things working. Let me show you the sector action for the year, Josh. You have seven of the 11 S&P 500 sectors outperforming your 2.8%. So this market is certainly becoming a lot more than just tech and big tech.

And when you talk to Mr. Bernstein, well-known, well-respected, obviously, what did he tell you he was buying?

Yeah, so it's interesting. So he he had a research note out, which is initially why I reached out to him, called the mid seven. Not a big mag seven fan right now, Josh. So he's not looking at things like tech. He's looking more at a sector like utilities, one of the best performers in the S&P 500. Interesting because you and I have talked to strategist that will tell you utilities because it's an AI play, right? AI that's involved in the power. Bernstein likes utilities because it has a little bit of defensive stance to it, and they have high dividends, right? Those companies that are able to just continuously produce cash and give back to investors is something he's sort of interested in right now. Not necessarily traditional growth companies like those companies in the tech.

Yeah, we we've had smart folks who like that sector because to your point, Josh, they they actually see it sort of a way to play offense and defense.

Yeah, it's a football player that can do it all, right? Utilities.

There you go. Thank you, Josh.