Earnings, JOLTS

Good morning contrarians! Welcome to the Daily Contrarian, our morning look at events likely to move markets. It is Tuesday, Oct. 29. The Bottom Line segment of today’s podcast starts at (3:39) for listeners who want to skip ahead.

State of Play

As we eye our board of indicators for signs of direction at 0630 it looks like risk-on could be the story:

• Cryptos are the big winner so far, with Bitcoin up 4% to trade north of $71,000. That appears to be a new high for the year;

• Stock index futures are flat with the exception of small caps. Those are moving just a little with the Russell 2000 down 0.3%;

• Commodities are rallying, recapturing losses from yesterday. WTI crude oil is up 1% to trade around $68/barrel with copper also up 1%;

• Bonds continue to move lower. The 10-year yields 4.30% whilst the 2-year yields 4.15%. A couple of weeks ago both were below 4% (yields move inversely to prices).

Today’s Known Events

Several earnings to tell you about:

• Royal Caribbean (RCL 0.00%↑) beat estimates and importantly raised guidance, which should also help risk appetite;

• JetBlue (JBLU 0.00%↑) was due to report already but has not yet. That should be up intermittently;

• Sofi (SOFI 0.00%↑), PayPal (PYPL 0.00%↑), McDonald’s (MCD 0.00%↑), the subject of a Stocks On The Contrarian Radar©️segment last week, Pfizer (PFE 0.00%↑) and Crocs (CROX 0.00%↑) also report before the open at 0930;

After the close at 1600 this afternoon we’ll hear from:

• AMD (AMD 0.00%↑)

• Google/Alphabet (GOOG 0.00%↑/GOOGL 0.00%↑ )

• Chipotle (CMG 0.00%↑)

• Visa (V 0.00%↑)

• Electronic Arts (EA 0.00%↑)

• and several others…

Case-Shiller home prices are out at 0900. The 20-city index, the most closely watched gauge (and the only one for which there is an economist estimate) is expected to increase by 4.6% year-over-year compared to 5.9% last month.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS, is out at 1000. Economists expect 7.9 million job openings, a small drop from the 8 million recorded last month. The quits levels were a little less than 3.1 million last month, corresponding to 1.9% of the workforce. That’s a slight decrease from the previous month when the quits level was an even 2.0%. There unfortunately isn’t an economist estimate for that.