Good morning, investors. The US stock market is closed today ahead of the Easter weekend, but new jobs data will still hit the wire at 8:30 AM ET.

For our purposes, we’ve still got a lot of ground to cover — let’s dive in.

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq both posted their weakest start to a year since 2022.

Oil has crossed $112 a barrel. The Iran conflict has interrupted the Strait of Hormuz and the Saaspocalypse has wiped out software valuations.

All that and the job market has held up relatively well.

Initial jobless claims just fell to 202,000, close to a two-year low and below economist expectations for 215,000, while unemployment remains at a historically modest 4.4% rate.

That is not a labor market on the verge of cracking.

"We're in a low hire, low fire environment," Phil Neuhart, head of market research at First Citizens Wealth, told me on Full Signal Thursday.

"If that were to turn to low hire, high fire, then we're starting to talk about real risk."

But that hasn’t happened yet. The disconnect between price action and jobs data is the story right now.

Markets are trading like the economy is breaking, but the cleanest macro data point — whether people are actually losing jobs — won’t cooperate with the sell off.

To be sure, continuing claims ticked up to 1.841 million from 1.819 million, and businesses are not adding workers either.

War risk and AI uncertainty has frozen some hiring plans, and a resilient labor market is not the same as one that is accelerating.

That said, the market's posture still looks overdone relative to the underlying data.

The last time the S&P 500 posted a Q1 decline of this magnitude was 2022, and the labor market that year was running at a totally different temperature with claims printing far higher and layoffs accelerating across industries.

This time, even as the Iran conflict has sent oil higher and repriced risks in the stock market, the economy has absorbed all of it without shedding jobs.

Neuhart flagged claims specifically as his team's signal to watch.

"If we start to see jobless claims move higher, that is something I think worth watching and I think the market will move on that."

Typically, either claims will start rising to justify the selloff, or the selloff reverses to catch up with the labor market.

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📊 The March jobs report is due this morning. Analysts expect the US economy added 60,000 jobs in the month and that unemployment rate held at 4.4%, per FactSet estimates. That would mark an improvement from the 92,000 loss from February. (CNN Business)

🛢️ West Texas crude climbed past $113 again. President Trump said that the US would hit Iran "extremely hard" for the next two to three weeks as the Strait of Hormuz shutdown carried on. (Investing.com)

🏚️ The 30-year mortgage rate rose to 6.46%. That marked the highest since September. The Iran war has added nearly half a percentage point to rates with Treasury yields climbing. (ABC)

I sat down with Phil Neuhart, head of market and economic research for First Citizens, to unpack the geopolitical shock hitting a resilient stock market, the red flags in economic data, what the AI trade unwinding could actually look like and more.

Tune in on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts (and please leave a review on your favorite platform!).

🗓 April 3, 2025: After President Trump’s “Liberation Day” speech the evening before, the S&P 500 fell 4.84% and the Nasdaq lost 1,600 points in the worst single-day sell-off since the COVID crash.

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