Aside from Q2 earnings season reaching its busiest week of the cycle, we’re also upon a new Jobs Week — JOLTS on Tuesday, ADP private-sector payrolls Wednesday and non-farm payrolls from BLS Friday morning. Thursday will bring Weekly Jobless Claims as per normal; those are at historically low levels, while the July jobs reports are expected to come in sub-100K.
Pre-market futures are disparately mixed at this hour: +550 points on the blue-chip Dow but -50 points on the tech-heavy Nasdaq. The S&P 500 splits the difference somewhat, +24 points. Oil prices are lower — $79 per barrel (/bbl) on WTI and $83/bbl on Brent crude — as the Trump administration called off fresh attacks on Iran over the weekend. According to the White House, a deal to keep open the Strait of Hormuz is imminent; Iran’s government denies any talks are ongoing.
Q2 Earnings at a Glance
This week, with most of the “Mag 7” stocks already having reported, we still see plenty of consequential earnings reports: SpaceXSPCX and AMDAMD tomorrow, DisneyDIS and SandiskSNDK Wednesday and AirbnbABNB on Thursday. After today’s close, we’ll hear from cybersecurity major PalantirPLTR and ON SemiconductorON, among others.
Ahead of today’s open, Tyson FoodsTSN missed its earnings estimate by -3.9%, posting $0.99 per share versus $1.03 expected. MarriottMAR outpaced estimates by +4.25%: earnings of $3.19 per share versus $3.06 anticipated. Mitsubishi UFJMUFG, despite current issues regarding a devaluing yen, saw a +32% positive surprise in its fiscal Q1 earnings report: $0.45 per share versus $0.34 projected.
What to Expect from Jobs Week
Tuesday’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) is expected to tick back to a “higher low” of 7.5 million open jobs for June. We’re off multi-year lows from December of last year by roughly a million openings, suggesting a snug labor market. The Quits rate remained below 2% in its most recent print, which points to less perceived opportunities in the labor market.
Private-sector payrolls from Automatic Data ProcessingADP are expected to further cool to 75K for July from 98K the prior month, which was the first sub-100K print since March. Chief economist Nela Richardson said “the overall effect is a slowdown in job creation.” This is currently forecasted to continue in private-sector hiring.
Weekly Jobless Claims have spent the last two prints sub-200K in the Initial side, levels comparable to the late 1960s — when the U.S. economy was in a far-different place. Depending on the state, collecting on unemployment is a worse option than driving for UberUBER or DoorDashDASH, which may have something to do with these historically low levels.
Friday’s non-farm payrolls report from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in the Big Kahuna of Jobs Week. It is expected to bounce back somewhat from the 57K reported for June, which came in roughly half of estimates, to +85K new jobs filled last month. The Unemployment Rate is expected to tick up to +4.3%, but this would likely depend on Labor Force Participation, which has been on the wane for the past few months.
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