us stocks came well off session lows but were still down in the final hour of trade on thursday as investors assessed private payrolls data and looked ahead to fridays december jobs report the dow jones industrial average djia was off 303 points or 09 to 32967 the sp 500 spx shed 1 and the nasdaq composite comp slumped 12 employment data published thursday suggested that the labor market still remains tight which could force the central bank to keep hiking interest rates to a higher level than currently anticipated to tame inflation most notably adp private payrolls data showed 235000 jobs were created in december beating wall streets expectations for 153000 new jobs