Jobless claims came in slightly better than expected this week, falling from 245K down to 240K compared to expectations of 243K.  It has now been nine weeks that claims have been at or below 250K, but more importantly, it was the 126th straight week that claims were under 300K.  That hasn’t happened since 1970!

With this week’s decline, the four-week moving average dropped down to 241.75K, which is just over 6K more than the multi-decade low of 235.5K that was hit eleven weeks ago.  While claims are close to a new low, don’t expect that level from mid-May to go down anytime soon.

The real headline in this week’s report was in the non-seasonally adjusted reading, where claims dropped below 200K!  That’s a pretty amazing feat for any time of the year, but for the current week of the year, it’s more than 100K below the average of 302K going back to 2000.  And guess when the last time claims were this low for the current week of the year?  The answer to that question is NEVER!  Or at least not since they have been tracking jobless claims going all the way back to 1968!

Bespoke co-founder Paul Hickey appeared on CNN’s OutFront with Erin Burnett and CNBC’s Power Lunch on Thursday to discuss our market thoughts.  To view either of the segments, please click on the images below.

With the drop in the US dollar and the outperformance of international stocks, the US stock market is losing share versus the rest of the world even though it’s in rally mode.  While the S&P 500 is up 10% year-to-date, the United States’ stock market cap as a percentage of total world stock market cap has dropped from 37.70% all the way down to 35% so far this year.

Just after Trump’s victory last November, the US quickly gained a lot of market cap versus the rest of the world, but that gain has more than evaporated at this point.  Since the election, the US has now lost more than one and a half percentage points of world stock market cap share.  That’s the opposite of what Trump was hoping for.  So even though the President has been touting the stock market’s gain lately, when you look closely, it has actually lost share versus the rest of the world since his victory.

The thousand point thresholds are dropping like flies these days.  With the caveat that a thousand points becomes an increasingly small percentage of the overall index as prices rise, the DJIA just crossed its fourth 1,000 point threshold since Trump’s election last November.  The table below shows the date that the DJIA has first crossed each 1,000 point threshold on a closing basis since it first closed above 1,000 back on 11/14/72. For each threshold, we show the date the DJIA first closed above that threshold, how many days transpired between that cross and the prior 1,000 point threshold, the percentage that each thousand point threshold represents of the index’s price, and then how many upside and downside crosses the DJIA has had with each level.

Since the election, the DJIA has now crossed four thousand point thresholds, and with each one, there has been very little in the way of looking back. For instance, once the DJIA crossed 19,000 it never closed back below that level. For 20,000, once it crossed that level, it only closed below it again once, while 21,000 only saw two subsequent closes. In looking for comparable periods, the current period is somewhat similar to the late 1990s, when the DJIA also crossed several 1,000 point thresholds in very short order. In the current period, these levels have been coming and going a lot faster, but again, it’s also important to remember that they represent a much smaller percentage of the overall index’s value than the levels that were crossed in the 1990s.  Finally, while it may seem as though the move from 21K to 22K was quick, at 154 calendar days (if that level holds between now and the closing bell), it was nearly five times longer than the time that elapsed between 20K and 21K (35 days) and two and a half times longer than the time it took to go from 19K to 20K.