New Jobs Report Surprises in a Big Way: 8 Key Items Shaping the Stock Market Friday

These are the early headlines and other items poised to influence the market at the start of the trading day. As we share this collection of market drivers, U.S. equity futures point to a mixed market open as we close out the trading week.

1. The August Employment Report surprised to the upside in a big way on Friday, showing 162,000 jobs were created during the month, well ahead of the 53,000 expected by the market. The change in total non-farm payroll employment for June was revised up by 11,000, from +20,000 to +31,000, and the change for July was revised up by 44,000, from -23,000 to +21,000. With these revisions, employment in June and July combined is 55,000 higher than previously reported.

That points to the jobs market being stronger than expected, and it clears the deck for the Fed to focus on inflation. On the wage front, average hourly wage gains ticking up to 3.1% year over year, but that’s still less than the recent inflation figures found in the July PCE Price Index.

Now to see what next week’s August CPI and PPI reports bring.

2. Anthropic PBC is set to finalize an expansion of its revolving credit facility to $15 billion, according to people familiar with the matter, clearing a hurdle before the artificial intelligence firm’s public filing for its highly anticipated IPO. Morgan Stanley is leading the process, the people said. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. also have prominent roles on the facility, along with Citigroup Inc., they said. The four lenders are also leading the IPO, Bloomberg News has reported. The Claude chatbot maker is seeking to raise as much as SpaceX or more in the initial public offering, people familiar with the preparations have said. (Bloomberg)

When we come back from the Labor Day weekend, we and a horde of others will be waiting for the Anthropic S-1 filing to land at the SEC website. It will be required reading with a high probability of multiple insights reached in the company’s business as well as its capacity and capex plans. Given the nature of what is shared in such a filing, we will want to compliment those insights with what is revealed during Anthropic’s eventual IPO roadshow. As we do that, our focus will be on the expanded array of services being planned by the company and how that fits into our thinking about expanding AI usage.

The offering will benefit the Portfolio’s position in Morgan Stanley (MS) shares but it will also set the bar for the expected IPO from OpenAI that could come later this year or in early 2027. Another positive for our MS shares and an monetization event for Neostellar Capital (NSLR). With NSLR in mind, we will also be tracking the Oura IPO and what that is likely to say for Neostellar’s largest portfolio holding, Whoop.

3. Tesla unleashed its steering-wheel-free Cybercabs on the roads of Austin, Texas, in the first public test of its promise to transition from traditional electric vehicles to fully autonomous cars… The offering puts Tesla in competition with ride-share providers like Uber and Lyft, as well as autonomous ride-hailing services from Alphabet’s Waymo and Amazon’s Zoox… Waymo, the leader in autonomous ride-hailing, has around 4,000 cars on the road across 14 cities, though it uses retrofitted vehicles with special sensors to enable human-free driving. (WSJ)

The United States’ top automotive safety regulator has opened an investigation into Tesla’s decision to launch its new Cybercab on public roads with no steering wheel or pedals. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) announced Friday morning that it opened the probe mere hours after Tesla put the first Cybercabs on the streets of Austin, Texas. Federal vehicle safety regulations require manual controls like brake pedals, though the Department of Transportation recently proposed removing those requirements for vehicles that are designed to be autonomously driven. (TechCrunch)

Estimates suggest a standard self-driving car in regular use produces about 4 terabytes (TB) of data daily, while high-end test or development vehicles can generate over 200 TB in a single 8-hour shift. That compares to a typical person using 240 gigabytes (GB) of home internet per month and 21 GB of mobile data in a month. While we are in the very, very early innings of autonomous cars, to say the incremental impact on data center and networking demand will be large will likely prove to be an understatement.

We’ll continue to track autonomous deployments and National Highway Transportation Safety Administration rules, tying them back to our positions in Amazon (AMZN) and Google (GOOGL) as well as those that are currently referred to as the “AI trade” basket. We continue to think that term is short-sighted.

4. A swarm of rogue OpenAI agents hijacked a German website this spring and transformed it into a bulletin board for other AI agents, according to new research published Friday and two people familiar with the matter. (Reuters)

Companies worldwide are grappling with a surge in AI-driven cyberattacks and ransomware that steal sensitive data and disrupt operations. The White House in July said it was launching a coordination group for AI developers and critical infrastructure operators to share information on cybersecurity vulnerabilities identified by AI systems. But it has released no details since, despite recent hacks by OpenAI and Anthropic AI agents. (Reuters)

We’ve said it more than a few times in recent days, but in our view cybersecurity is an essential holding in every investor portfolio and AI is going to increase the vector and velocity of attacks.

5. Volkswagen’s supervisory board has reached a surprise unanimous deal to back chief executive Oliver Blume’s sweeping overhaul that will see the German carmaker slash up to 50,000 jobs and could lead to plant closures. The company told investors on Thursday evening that the restructuring would be “the most extensive transformation programme” in its history. (FT)

As more details of this transformation are spelled out, given our position in the Robo Global Robotics & Automation Index ETF (ROBO), we’re curious to see the role automation and robotics will play.

6. As we break for the long weekend and next week’s compressed trading days, there will be a flurry of activity for us to work through. From the August CPI and PPI data to the Goldman Sachs Communacopia & Technology Conference, the Citi 2026 Global TMT Conference, and the Wolfe Research TMT Conference, inflation and company updates will take center stage. So too will Apple’s (AAPL) Surprise and Shine event, that will unveil its latest iPhone hardware but also serve as coming out party for new CEO John Ternus.

Use the weekend to rest up my friends!

7. Economic data today per TipRanks: Employment Report (August).

8. Companies reporting today per TipRanks: AM – There are no market moving earnings reports expected on Friday morning.

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At the time of publication, TheStreet Pro Portfolio was long AMZN, GOOGL, MS, NSLR and ROBO.