U.S. STOCK PREVIEW,Thursday, June 13th, 2013

Today’s weekly initial unemployment claims report is expected to be unchanged at 346,000 following last week’s decline of -11,000 to 346,000. Meanwhile, today’s weekly continuing claims report is expected to show an increase of +26,000 to 2.978 million, reversing exactly one-half of last week’s decline of -52,000 to 2.952 million. Today’s May retail sales report is expected to show a moderate increase of +0.4% m/m and +0.3% ex-autos. The expected increases would indicate that consumer spending has picked up again after two very poor months in March and April. Today’s May import price index report is expected to be unchanged m/m at after the -0.5% m/m report seen in April. There are no earnings reports today from the Russell 1000 companies.

Conferences during the remainder of this week include: 12th International Cloud Expo on Mon-Thu, Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2013 on Mon-Fri, Morgan Stanley Financials Conference on Tue-Wed, Goldman Sachs Healthcare Conference on Tue-Thu, William Blair Growth Stock Conference on Tue-Thu, Goldman Sachs Global HealthCare Conference on Wed-Thu, Piper Jaffray Consumer Conference on Wed-Thu, and Deutsche Bank Global Industrials and Basic Materials Conference on Wed-Fri.