Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Lunch, our afternoon update on today's market action news and analysis.

Good afternoon, today's Thursday, October 10th, and I'm your host Kim Kont. Our top story so far.

After a week of little macro data to swing stocks, today's numbers left traders still in limbo.

Retail inflation came in hotter than anticipated but with a much

hoped for decline in shelter costs, but a spiking claims for unemployment benefits

put the health of the labor market back in play. The headline September

CPI rose 0.2% on the month a little higher than 0.1% expected. The annual rate

to 2.4%, slightly above the expected drop to 2.3%. The index saw a broad rise of prices with food up 0.4%,

but while shelter also rose up 0.2%, that was down from the 0.5% jump in August.

Combined, the two indexes contributed more than 75% of the monthly all items increase.

Core CPI, excluding food and energy,

rose 0.3% higher than the 0.2% monthly rise forecast.

The annual rate was expected to stay at 3.2%, but ticked up to 3.3%.

Wells Fargo economists say the numbers are consistent with their view that while the overall trend in core inflation remains lower, further improvement is likely to be slower going.

Meanwhile, weekly initial jobless claims jumped to 258,000 from 225,000 the week before, well ahead of the 231,000 consensus.

Pantheon macroeconomist Oliver Allen says,

the rise to the highest level of more than a year

can mostly be put down to disruption caused by Hurricane Helene,

which made landfall late on September 26th.

Ongoing furloughs and strikes at Boeing have

probably played a role too. What does that mean for a data-dependent Fed? The

inflation figures pushed the odds of no change at the November rates meeting above 10 percent, and chances of a 50-basis point cut now with the O.

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