Wall Street Greek: Today's Market: Ford EPS, Jobless Claims, Existing Home Sales

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Today's Market

Ford EPS Results

Ford actually posted a profit in its second quarter ended June, lifting the shares in the pre-market. A closer look reveals that it was not market share gains or superiority that drove the green results, but debt restructuring. The only US automaker of significance to not go bankrupt posted a loss from continuing operations of $0.21, excluding other one-time items, comparing favorably against the analysts' consensus for a $0.50 loss, according to Reuters and Bloomberg. That significant difference is certainly playing a greater role in lifting Ford shares today (+10% in pre-market) than its news that it will post a profit in 2011! We now have impetus to post an article we've been long planning regarding Ford, so stay tuned.

Jobless Claims

Jobless claims jumped 30,000, to 554K for the week ending July 18. The four-week moving average still eased 19K, to 566K, given recent period improvement. Insured unemployment stuck at 4.7%, which means the other 5% is lacking a source of income, weighing on spending. Same goes for the other 7% who are underemployed, working part-time jobs for survival's sake.

Hope this helps...

In case you were unaware, extended unemployment insurance benefits were available in Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Puerto Rico, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and Wisconsin during the week ending July 4.

Places you might not want to move to just yet:

The largest increases in initial claims for the week ending July 11 were in New York (+12,504), North Carolina (+10,382), Florida (+10,043), Missouri (+8,293), and Tennessee (+6,943), while the largest decreases were in Michigan (-6,648), Massachusetts (-2,910), New Jersey (-2,888), Indiana (-2,497), and California (-1,755).

Existing Home Sales

Existing Home Sales for June are due for report at 10:00 AM this morning. Bloomberg's consensus of economists sees the annual pace of sales improving to 4.85 million, after posting a 2.4% increase in May. Whether you want to believe it or not, housing has stabilized and is improving modestly. The inventory of homes for sale improved in May as well, and significantly so. Housing inventory stood at 9.6 months, down from 10.1 in April. However, you should know that the calculation of inventory includes the monthly sales pace as the denominator, and that was drastically depressed in the earlier months of this year. A lower denominator makes for a larger "months" figure. That said, as the sales pace has improved to a more normalized rate, inventory might finally see real change for the better.

EPS Schedule

Look for EPS news from 3M (NYSE: MMM), Alaska Airlines (NYSE: ALK), Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN), American Express (NYSE: AXP), Baidu (Nasdaq: BIDU), Bristol-Myers Squibb (NYSE: BMY), Broadcom (Nasdaq: BRCM), Chubb (NYSE: CB), Credit Suisse (NYSE: CS), Encana (NYSE: ECA), Kimberly-Clark (NYSE: KMB), KLA-Tencor (Nasdaq: KLAC), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT), Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC), Occidental Petroleum (NYSE: OXY), Philip Morris (NYSE: PM), PNC Financial (NYSE: PNC), Raytheon (NYSE: RTN), The Cheesecake Factory (Nasdaq: CAKE), VCA Antech (Nasdaq: WOOF), Wyeth (NYSE: WYE) and many more.