The Market In 5 Minutes: Improved Jobless Claims, A Big Food Acquisition And Pepsi's Latest Earnings

Below is a tool used by the Benzinga News Desk each trading day -- it's a look at everything happening in the market, in five minutes. Apply for daily AM access by clicking here or email minutes@benzinga.com.

Macro Focus

Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 23 points to 17,819.00, while the Standard & Poor’s 500 index futures fell 3.50 points to 2,091.50. Futures for the Nasdaq 100 index declined 5.50 points to 4,436.00.

Oil prices traded higher as Brent crude futures rose 0.90 percent to trade at $49.29 per barrel, while US WTI crude futures also gained 0.97 percent to trade at $47.94 a barrel.

U.K. industrial production slipped 0.5 percent in May, while Germany's industrial production declined 1.3 percent in May. France's trade deficit shrank to 2.8 billion euros ($3.1 billion) in May, compared to EUR4.8 billion in April.

BZ News Desk Focus

PepsiCo PEP Reports Q2 Core EPS $1.35 vs $1.30 Est., Sales $15.4B vs $15.37B Est.

USA ADP Employment Change for June 172.0K vs 159.0K consensus estimate.

USA Initial Jobless Claims for July 1 254.0K vs 270.0K consensus estimate.

The FOMC's latest minutes "highlight the tricky position Fed officials find themselves in," Allianz Chief Economist Mohamed A. El-Erian told Benzinga, "including trying to get their arms around the unusual uncertainty facing the economy on account of both domestic and international factors."

Sell-Side Themes

Raymond James downgraded both Bank of America BAC and Wells Fargo WFC.

Sell-Side's Most Noteworthy Calls

Morgan Stanley downgraded Red Hat RHT to Equal-Weight.
Deutsche Bank downgraded First Solar FSLR to Hold.
Raymond James upgraded Marathon Oil MRO to Strong Buy.
BMO upgraded Endologix ELGX to Outperform.
Stifel initiated coverage on Agree Realty ADC at Buy.
Piper Jaffray initiated coverage on Ultragenyx RARE at Overweight.

Deal Talk

France-based Danone announced will acquire WhiteWave Foods WWAV for $56.25 per share in a deal that values the U.S. organic food producer at $12.5 billion including debt.

Moodstocks announced it has been acquired by Google GOOGL. Moostocks provides image recognition and allows smartphones to recognize what they are pointed at.

In The News

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon warned he may relocate "a few thousand" of his employees from the U.K. if the country’s divorce settlement with the European Union hurts banks.

Hedge funder Brett Barna threw a wild Hamptons party — awash with Champagne, scores of bikini-clad women and costumed gun-toting midgets — and allegedly trashed a $20 million mansion. Barna, a portfolio manager at Louis Bacon’s Moore Capital Management, hosted the all-day "#Sprayathon" pool party on Sunday, where 1,000 people doused themselves in bubbly as rapper Ace Hood performed.

Renaissance Technologies seeks a patent for anti-HFT invention. Replete with schematic drawings, a patent filing describes a novel way for “executing synchronized trades in multiple exchanges.” The invention consists of not only sophisticated algorithms and a host of computer servers, but atomic clocks -- precisely calibrated to vibrations of irradiated cesium atoms -- to sync orders to within a few billionths of a second.

Blogosphere

Brexit is starting to hurt the real economy. That's the message from one of Britain's biggest retailers. Marks & Spencer just reported its worst trading figures since the depth of the financial crisis, and said consumer confidence slid in the run up to the vote, and remains fragile.

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