Futures dip ahead of weekly jobless claims number

By Uday Sampath Kumar

(Reuters) – U.S. stock index futures dipped on Thursday as investors braced for another staggering weekly jobless claims number, while oil prices rose on hopes of sweeping production cuts.

The number of initial jobless claims are expected to have surged to 15 million in the past three weeks, even with figures for the week ended April 4 likely slipping to a seasonally adjusted 5.25 million, according to a Reuters poll of economists.

Estimates in the survey were as high as 9.295 million, and the final report from the Labor Department is expected at 8:30 a.m. ET.

Wall Street jumped on Wednesday on early signs the coronavirus outbreak in U.S. hot spots was close to peaking, with the Dow Jones <.DJI> and S&P 500 <.SPX> ending more than 3.4% higher.

Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil , Chevron , Marathon Oil and Apache Corp rose between 1.5% and 16% in premarket trade ahead of a meeting of the world’s biggest oil producers to discuss production cuts.

At 06:02 a.m. EDT, Dow e-minis <1YMcv1> were down 8 points, or 0.03%, S&P 500 e-minis were down 5.5 points, or 0.2% and Nasdaq 100 e-minis were down 24.5 points, or 0.3%.

SPDR S&P 500 ETFs were down 0.28%.

(Reporting by Uday Sampath in Bengaluru; Editing by Arun Koyyur)