By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- U.S. stock markets opened mixed on Thursday, unable to add much to Wednesday's gains that left them at a record high for the third straight day, despite the tailwinds of a relaxed Federal Reserve and a strengthening labor market.
By 9:45 AM ET (1345 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 52 points, or 0.2% at 36,104 points. The S&P 500 was up a little less than 0.1% and the Nasdaq Composite was up 0.2%.
Earlier, the Labor Department had said that initial jobless claims fell to a new post-pandemic low at 269,000 last week. They're now running at a level that would have been exceptionally low at pretty much any time in recent history except for the presidency of Donald Trump. Other data also signaled no end to strong domestic demand ahead of the holiday season, with imports rising to a new record high of $288.5 billion in September.
The jobless claims data, along with Wednesday's strong ADP private nonfarm payrolls report, suggest that official employment data on Friday will show a clear re-acceleration in October, after falling to their lowest level in eight months in September. Analysts expect nonfarm jobs to have grown by 450,000 through the middle of last month.
Of more concern were other data, which showed unit labor costs rising 8.3% in the third quarter and productivity falling by 5.0%. Those point to a hardening of inflationary pressures that may yet cause the Federal Reserve to tighten monetary policy faster than it currently wants to.
Among individual movers, Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) stock caught the eye with a 12% gain after reporting record fiscal fourth-quarter sales that underlined its pricing power with key customer segments, such as smartphone makers and the automotive sector. The numbers also helped Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) stock rise 5.5% and Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) stock rise 1.5%
By contrast, Moderna (NASDAQ:MRNA) stock slumped 16% to a four-month low after revising down its estimates for group sales this year, which consist overwhelmingly of its Covid-19 vaccine. That was a sharp contrast with Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) which bumped its forecasts for vaccine sales higher earlier in the week. Moderna is struggling to ramp up production of its vaccine.
Also perhaps weighing on sentiment was the approval in the U.K. of Merck's antiviral Covid-19 pill. While that's not conceived as an alternative to vaccination, it does point to alternative strategies for containing the disease by national health care systems. Merck (NYSE:MRK) stock rose 1.2% to a new all-time high. It's risen nearly 25% in the seven weeks since announcing the pill's effectiveness. The news hit rival vaccine makers, taking 7.0% off BioNTech (NASDAQ:BNTX) stock and 5.6% off Novavax (NASDAQ:NVAX) stock.
Elsewhere, Etsy (NASDAQ:ETSY) stock rose 12% as investors warmed to the idea that the crafts-based e-commerce site could be a big winner this holiday season, due to its reliance on sellers who work largely from home in North America, rather than at the end of supply chains thousands of miles away. Its stock had fallen slightly in after-hours trading on Thursday after it announced mildly disappointing numbers for the quarter through September.