Investing.com – Wall Street traded lower on Thursday with the Dow off more than 100 points as markets digested mixed economic data and as investors prepared for the publication of non-farm payrolls on the last trading day of the week.
At 12:15AM ET (17:15GMT), the Dow Jones fell 107 points, or 0.54%, the S&P 500 fell 10 points, or 0.42%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite traded down 9 points, or 0.38%.
Ahead of Friday’s highly anticipated December employment report, investors received mixed signals on the U.S. labor market.
The ADP payrolls data released on Thursday disappointed expectations with the creation of just 153,000 jobs in the last month of 2016, missing the forecast for 170,000 and causing concern over the estimate of 175,000 nonfarm payrolls for Friday’s government report.
To the contrary, weekly jobless claims dropped much more than expected, although continuing jobless claims unexpectedly rose to levels not seen since the beginning of last September.
On a clearly positive note, the ISM non-manufacturing data showed that activity in the services sector held steady at a 13-month high in December, despite analyst expectations for growth to ease.
Meanwhile, oil prices turned lower despite a larger than expected draw on U.S. crude inventories. The official EIA data saw crude stockpiles decline by 7.051 million barrels, compared to expectations for a drop of 2.152 million.
On a bearish note, the turnaround in oil prices may have been due to the fact that distillate inventories surged by more 10.051 million barrels and gasoline stockpiles jumped by 8.307 million.
U.S. crude futures fell 0.30% to $53.10 by 12:17AM ET (17:17GMT), while Brent oil traded down 0.27% to $56.31.
In company news, retailers were under pressure with Kohl’s (NYSE:KSS) crashing nearly 20% after slashing its full-year earnings guidance to $3.60-$3.65 a share, from the prior $3.94.
Macy’s (NYSE:M) too sank nearly 14% after the department store chain reported a 2.1% drop in same-store sales in December.
Barnes & Noble (NYSE:BKS) tumbled 7% after the book seller projected a 6% drop in full-year comparable sales.
On the upside, shares of Costco Wholesale (NASDAQ:COST) were up 2% after reporting a jump of 5% in December net sales.
Also making headlines, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) recorded slight gains as it announced that its App Store generated $20 billion for developers in 2016, a 40% gain from a year earlier.