Monday, December 2, 2024
Pre-market futures are flat as a pancake at this hour, with none of the major indexes either up or down 0.1% currently. We’re still a day away from early morning jobs data, which starts tomorrow with private-sector payrolls for November from Automatic Data Processing ADP. Ahead of today’s open, we’re essentially devoid of market-moving news.
JOLTS to Kick Off Jobs Week, 10am ET
The big news of today will like be the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS), which has tracked the labor market in terms of open job positions in the U.S. since 2001. It also marks the start of Jobs Week, which concludes with the big Employment Situation report on Friday morning.
Results, expected at 10am ET today, are to come up a tad — to 7.5 million job openings for October from 7.44 million reported the prior month. This was the lowest level reported since back in January of 2021, when Covid was still in full swing but the Great Reopening had begun to emerge.
For further perspective, the all-time high JOLTS headline came in March 2022, at 12.2 million. Thankfully, we’re well below those levels. That, in fact, was the very month the Fed began raising interest rates to (belatedly) put a damper on runaway inflation. This extremely high job openings level bespoke of supply chain disruptions we hadn’t seen in 40 years across segments of the economy.
All-time low JOLTS figures, by the way, came in May of 2009, at 2.55 million. This was the culmination of the fallout of the financial crisis that struck in autumn of the previous year. For most of the next decade we saw job openings sub-5 million — in some ways, a measure of peak employment — until about a year or so prior to the Covid crisis, when the U.S. saw JOLTS headlines swell to 7+ million, roughly where we are again.
What to Expect for the Markets Later Today
Also during the normal trading session this Tuesday, November Auto Sales numbers will be released by major global auto manufacturers. These usually only spur market activity if a company is far ahead of — or behind — earlier projections.
After today’s close, we’ll see yet more earnings reports. Salesforce.com CRM will be the big name, and this is one of those company’s that has no earnings misses in their publicly traded history. Analysts expect +15% growth in earnings per share for its fiscal Q3 (October), with +7% gains in quarterly revenues.
Also on the calendar this afternoon will be Okta OKTA, an enterprise-level cloud software firm which provides security solutions. This company has struggled to gain any traction in its share price, -7% year to date, despite looking to grow +29% on its bottom line and +11% on its top. The company last posted an earnings miss way back in 2017.
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