A currency trader watches monitors at the foreign exchange dealing room of the KEB Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, July 1, 2021.Asian shares are mostly lower as investors await a much watched U.S. jobs for indications of how the recovery from the pandemic is faring.
A currency trader watches monitors at the foreign exchange dealing room of the KEB Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, July 1, 2021. Asian shares are mostly lower as investors await a much watched U.S. jobs for indications of how the recovery from the pandemic is faring.
A currency trader watches monitors at the foreign exchange dealing room of the KEB Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, July 1, 2021.Asian shares are mostly lower as investors await a much watched U.S. jobs for indications of how the recovery from the pandemic is faring.
Currency traders watch monitors at the foreign exchange dealing room of the KEB Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, July 1, 2021. Asian shares are mostly lower as investors await a much watched U.S. jobs for indications of how the recovery from the pandemic is faring.
People walk through steam from a street grating outside the New York Stock Exchange, Wednesday, June 16, 2021. Stocks are off to a mixed start on Wall Street as traders wait for the latest U.S. monthly jobs report due out Friday, July 2. The S&P 500 was little changed in the early going Wednesday, June 30.
Stocks were up modestly on Thursday, adding to the gains that helped the stock market close out its best first half of a year since the dotcom bubble.
Investors have been encouraged by data that show the economy continues its recovery from the pandemic. The highly anticipated jobs report for June comes out Friday.
The S&P 500 index was up 0.3% as of 12:57 p.m. Eastern. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 76 points, or 0.2%, to 34,578. Health care and energy companies, along with banks, led the way.
The technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 0.3% due to weakness in the tech sector.
The S&P ended the first half of 2021 up 14.5%, it’s best six month period since 1998, as investors have embraced the post-pandemic economic recovery and set aside worries about inflation.
Stocks got a boost from a positive report on the job market. The number of workers filing for unemployment benefits fell to 364,000 last week, the lowest level since the pandemic walloped the economy.
Employment has been one of the shakier areas of the economic recovery and has lagged other measures such as consumer confidence and retail sales. Economists and analysts have said that a much fuller and more stable recovery is dependent on more people going back to work.
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