Stocks are rallying
US stocks are rallying in trading on Thursday after some dissapointing economic data dropped earlier.
Near 12:00 p.m. ET, the Dow was up 192 points, the S&P 500 was up 19 points, and the Nasdaq was up 25 points.
Retail sales fell 0.6% in February, missing the expectation for 0.3% growth. Ian Shepherdson at Pantheon Macroeconomics wrote: "In one line, retailers suffer in bad winter weather. That's all." Last week, initial jobless claims fell to 289,000 from 325,000 the previous week, lower than the 305,000 forecast.
At 2:00 p.m. ET, we'll get the Treasury budget.
The euro is less than 1% higher after falling to a fresh 12-year low, below $1.05, around midnight ET. Wall Street has forecast how soon it will reach parity, and Deutsche Bank sees that happening this year.
Lumber Liquidators is up nearly 12% after the company's conference call this morning that addressed a recent "60 Minutes" story about potential health risks from its China-sourced laminate flooring. It said that since the broadcast, net sales have fallen 7.5% compared to the same period last year. Chief financial officer Dan Terrell said the company's sales would have to fall 27% before it gets into serious financial trouble, although it doesn't see that happening.
Meanwhile, shake shack is getting crushed, and fell as much as 10% in trading after the company announced its first earnings results on Wednesday. It posted a net loss of $0.01 per share, compared to the $0.03 expected, while sales beat forecasts at $34.8 million, up 51.5%, versus $33 million expected.
Box shares are also getting smoked, falling as much as 18% during trading after the cloud-storage company reported an earnings-per-share loss of $1.65, worse than analyst expectations of $1.17. Box's CEO has said Wall Street got its math wrong.
Intel shares fell as much as 4% lower after it dampened its guidance for the first quarter of 2015.