Another 2.4 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits

In the week ending May 16th, another 2.4 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits. Yahoo Finance's Emily McCormick joins The First Trade to discuss jobless claims, in addition to Best Buy and TJX earnings reports.

Video Transcript

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Good morning, everyone, and welcome to The First Trade on Yahoo Finance for this Thursday, May 21. I'm Alexis Christoforous along with my co-anchor Brian Sozzi. Moments ago, the Labor Department said another 2.4 million Americans applied for unemployment benefits in this last week, continuing a wave of historically high filings since the economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic began in mid-March.

Taking a look at stock futures, they are drifting lower here this morning-- Dow futures off 45 points. In the broader market, the S&P futures are down about six. NASDAQ futures off 11. Emily McCormick has been tracking the unemployment figures this morning and has more for us. Hi, Emily.

EMILY MCCORMICK: Good morning, Alexis. And this is now the ninth straight week that we saw a new weekly unemployment claims come in at multi millions. So those initial jobless claims were at 2.438 million for the week end at May 16. That was marginally higher than the 2.4 million expected by consensus economists. But it was a step down from the downwardly-revised 2.7 million new jobless claims from the week before.

So this was the seventh straight week that the level of new unemployment claims fell relative to the prior week. And by state, we saw that California had the highest level of first-time jobless claims last week at more than 246,000. And this was an increase of 33,000 from the prior week. Florida and New York state also posted new jobless claims of more than 200,000 last week, although most states did see a drop in the level of new claims relative to the week before.

Also want to take a look at those continuing jobless claims since those did continue to rise. They hit a fresh all-time high of more than 25 million for the week end at May 9. And those are reported on a one-week lag. And it points to the millions of individuals who remain persistently unemployed during the coronavirus pandemic.

And this was above consensus estimates for just over 24 million. And continuing, claims a week earlier were revised down slightly to 22 and 1/2 million. And then finally, want to point out that we have the advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate up by 1.7 percentage points-- now, to 17.2%. So overall, yet another tough week for the labor market. We do have stock futures trading down just slightly amid this report. Alexis.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: And Emily, we're getting some more clues on how consumers are behaving during this pandemic-- if they're spending and if so, what they're spending on. We've got Best Buy out with earnings this morning and also the parent company of TJ Maxx and Ross stores. How did they do?

EMILY MCCORMICK: Well, taking a look at Best Buy, we did have results lower compared to last year, but they did beat consensus expectations on both sales and profit. Taking a look at first quarter enterprise comparable same-store sales, those were down 5.7% in the US but still better than the 11.2% drop expected.

Now, the largest comparable sales growth drivers were in computing and gaming-- so really seeing a boost from the work-from-home phenomenon we've seen over the past couple of months. But these sales gains were more than offset by declines in home theater, mobile phones, digital imaging, and services.

Digital sales were also a major contributor to Best Buy's results. We saw US online comparable sales up 155% over last year in the first quarter. And as a reminder for Best Buy, that company did shift all of its stores to curbside pickup only in the middle of the first quarter, although the company does now have about 70% of its overall retail locations open by appointment only.

And then taking a look at TJ Maxx, or TJX, the parent company of TV Maxx, we did see first quarter net sales down by more than 50% over last year and did miss consensus estimates. Also swung to a loss in first quarter with its adjusted loss per share at $0.74. But do want to look at the bright spot here. We have TJX beginning to reopen its stores globally.

It now has more than 1,600 locations open and during that fiscal quarter-- ended in May-- TJX did have a total of more than 4,500 stores. So a large percentage of those are at least beginning to reopen. And TJX did say it's seeing very strong initial sales overall at stores across all states and countries that have begun reopening in at least the past week.

And it believes that most of its stores can be reopened by the end of June. Taking a look at these stocks, we do have Best Buy off about 3.8% in premarket trading. But looking at TJX, quite the opposite story there-- those shares are up 6.3%, Alexis.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: All right, Emily McCormick, thank you.