We felt some turbulence across equity markets heading into the long weekend, with large-cap growth leading the charge downward across Thursday and Friday. While this put a scratch in the growth vs. value outperformance, it would take a few weeks of this sustained behavior to fully wipe out the 1-year performance gap. Please see the Research Supplement for more details on the volatility over the past 2 days.
The unemployment rate fell to 8.4% from 10.2% previously. This beat the expected 9.8%, even while the participation rate increased amid the expiration of extended unemployment benefits. We are still well short of getting close to prepandemic levels and the improvement has been slowing and attention will be paid to upcoming reports amid the back-to-school season (traditionally, at least) and into the holidays later this year.
Order data improved as well with Durable Goods Orders staying in double-digit territory, increasing 11.4% and Factory Orders increased 6.4% in July. Both slightly beat expectations.