Stock Market Today: Nasdaq Futures Bounce 1.4 Percent After the Worst Day Since April 2025 — and the Jobs Report Decides the Morning
Wall Street is trying to steady itself Friday: Nasdaq futures are up about 1.4 percent, led by the chip names that fell hardest Thursday, while Dow futures point the other way — and everything waits on the October jobs report at 7:30 AM Central, expected to show 65,000 new jobs with unemployment holding at 4.2 percent.
The morning after Wall Street's worst day since April 2025, the bounce is narrow and it is early. Nasdaq 100 futures were up 1.43 percent at 27,135.25 as of about 5:37 AM Central, and S&P 500 futures were up 0.29 percent at 7,404.50, while Dow futures were down 0.9 percent at 51,150 — Yahoo Finance quotes carried in Friday's morning briefs, with Reuters reporting a similar split overnight. The gains sit in the names that were hit hardest on Thursday: Nvidia was up 3.6 percent before the bell, and AMD, Intel, Broadcom and Micron were up between 5 and 8.3 percent. Thursday's damage is the backdrop: the Dow fell 1,833 points, or 3.44 percent, to 51,523.06, the S&P 500 dropped 4.36 percent, and the Nasdaq Composite fell about 5.5 percent to 24,315, in correction territory.
The day's verdict arrives at 7:30 AM Central with the October jobs report. A Reuters poll expects payrolls to rise 65,000, the unemployment rate to hold at 4.2 percent, and average hourly earnings to rise 0.3 percent for the month; a Dow Jones consensus carried by TipRanks is a touch lower at 59,000 jobs. September's report rose just 29,000, held down by a calendar quirk tied to a late Labor Day, according to Reuters, and expected annual wage growth of 2.9 percent would be the first reading below 3 percent since May 2021. With Reuters estimating the payroll breakeven — the pace needed to hold unemployment steady — at only about 40,000 jobs a month, down from about 150,000 in 2024, even a modest headline number can still describe a labor market holding its ground.
Rates are the other half of the morning. Traders still price a better-than-65 percent chance that the Federal Reserve raises rates in December, according to the CME FedWatch Tool as reported by Reuters, after the Fed held its rate at 3.75 to 4.00 percent on October 28 and said inflation “remains elevated.” Thursday's supporting data ran firm — initial jobless claims at 189,000, third-quarter productivity up 3.6 percent and unit labor costs down 0.7 percent — which is why the wage line in this morning's report may matter as much as the headline jobs number for a market already braced for a hike.
What this desk is watching is whether the premarket bounce widens beyond chips when the cash session opens, and how the December odds move once the payrolls number prints. The report is the first full read on hiring since the Fed's October hold, and it lands in a market that spent Thursday repricing a political risk — the prospect that the new Democratic Congress slows the AI data-center buildout — rather than an earnings miss. This desk files the result when it lands; until 7:30, Friday is a futures bounce and a question, not a recovery.
