Financial News

LONDON (ShareCast) - Wall Street tumbled in midday trades as jobless figures weighed on investor sentiment ahead of the extended holiday weekend.

Across the markets, the Dow Jones (news) is down 171 points to 8332 with the Nasdaq (NASDAQ: news) falling 45 points to 1800. The S&P 500 is down 21 points. Markets are closed tomorrow for Independence Day.

Another 467,000 people joined the queue for work last month, far more than the 365,000 predicted. More than 6m American jobs have now been lost since the recession began, but the latest figure was the first month-on-month drop in four months. The unemployment rate rose for the ninth month in a row to 9.5%, pretty much matching expectations. Many experts forecast a rise to 9.6% from May's 9.4%.

But the Labor Department did say initial jobless clams fell to 614,000 last week from 630,000 the week before, as expected.

Meanwhile, the Commerce Department said May factory orders rose 1.2 against forecasts for a rise of 0.9%. Factory orders rose a revised 0.5% in April.

Alcoa (NYSE: AA - news) which kicks off the second quarter results season next week, was the worst performing Dow constituent, closely followed by United Tech (900030.KS - news) and Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT - news) .

The jobless data pushed recruitment company Monster Worldwide (NASDAQ: MNST - news) lower but medical equipment company Illumina (NASDAQ: ILMN - news) is the one of the worst performers, suffering a double-digit percentage fall after second-quarter revenue came in at $161m, versus guidance of $168m.

Power generator Dynegy (NYSE: DYN - news) is sharply lower after UBS (Virt-X: UBSN.VX - news) cut its rating on the stock from "neutral" to "sell".

Exelon (NYSE: EXC - news) has upped its hostile takeover offer for rival power generator NRG to $8bn versus the previous offer of $7bn.