With the unemployment rate at historically low levels, investors will be keen to dig a little deeper and watch how the labor participation rate panned out in May to better understand if the economy is overheated or there is ample legroom for stocks to go up in the last few weeks of Q2.
There will be a slow start this week, thanks to the Memorial Day holiday, but Hewlett Packard (HPQ ) investors should be happy that it is still holding the most market share in the PC market and there might be some update on how its printing segment is doing. After all, the bulk of HPQ’s operating profits comes from selling printers and ink cartridges.
Besides the employment situation report, investors will also get a chance to assess the economic growth rate in Q1 and although the first estimate came out at 2.3%, the second estimate might come out a little better.
To sum up, the sideways market should continue to prevail even if we get some really good employment numbers in the nonfarm sector because that will concern investors about more rate hikes in 2018. Let’s hope the unemployment rate doesn’t drop too far, too fast.
Check out last week’s Market Glance here in which investors focused on two important housing market statistics on new and existing home sales.
