By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- U.S. stock markets opened higher on Thursday, shrugging off some mixed economic data and apparently reassured by the lack of immediate escalation of geopolitical risks as NATO and the G7 sat down to discuss Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
By 9:50 AM ET (1350 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 128 points or 0.4%, while the S&P 500 was up 0.5% and the Nasdaq Composite was up 0.4%, resuming their upward trend after a minor correction on Wednesday.
The three indices may have opened more strongly, however, had it not been for a surprisingly soft set of durable goods data, which showed that core durable goods purchases, excluding volatile items such as defense and aerospace goods, fell by 0.3%, their first drop in a year. Headline goods purchases also fell for the first time in five months. The figures may reflect the fading of the pandemic surge in hardware purchases, which was driven by the widespread adoption of remote working.
There was brighter news from the economy in the shape of weekly jobless claims, where initial claims fell to their lowest since 1969 at 187,000. That was well below forecasts for 212,000, and a continuing reminder of the tightness of the labor market, which is fostering ever-broader rises in wage settlements.
"We expect initial claims to remain low as employers struggling to hire and retain workers keep layoffs to a minimum," said Oxford Economics analyst Nancy Vanden Houten in a note to clients.
The early news from a full day of summits held by NATO, the G7 and EU didn't point to any game-changing escalations, although leaders again warned Russia against using chemical and biological weapons. Ukrainian authorities and unverified footage suggest that the Russian airforce used white phosphorus in attacks on Kyiv suburbs on Wednesday night. A White House official also briefed reporters that Ukraine's President Zelensky had not repeated his request for a no-fly zone in a virtual address to the NATO summit. He also stated that the U.S. will supply Ukraine with anti-ship missiles, on the same day that Ukrainian forces appeared to have crippled a large Russian landing ship at the port of Berdyansk.
Among individual movers, Uber (NYSE:UBER) stock rose 2.6% after it announced a big change in its attitude to licensed taxicabs. The company will list licensed New York City yellow cabs on its app in a move that will ease some of the problems it has had with driver availability since the pandemic. It's not clear what commission it will charge for yellow cab bookings.
Oshkosh (NYSE:OSK) stock rose 0.9% after the U.S. Postal Service confirmed a $3 billion order for its electric delivery vans, and Nikola (NASDAQ:NKLA) stock rose 9.4% to its highest in two months after CEO Mark Russell said the electric truckmaker will start deliveries in the second quarter. It's yet to register any meaningful revenue from vehicle sales, having struggled to overcome a scandal about its previous management overhyping the company's technical progress.
Elsewhere, Chinese ADRs were broadly lower amid fears for the Chinese economy as it perseveres with its Zero-Covid policy despite the spread of new variants of the disease that are much harder to contain than the original Wuhan strain.