Longshoremen Strike, JOLTS, Some Earnings

Good morning contrarians! Welcome to the Daily Contrarian, our morning look at events likely to move markets. It is Tuesday, Oct. 1. The first trading day of the fourth quarter! The Bottom Line segment of today’s podcast starts at (3:24) for listeners who want to skip ahead.

State of Play

Longshoremen on the East and Gulf coasts are officially on strike as of midnight, affecting almost half of all import traffic in the US. Futures markets seem unmoved by this, judging by our board of indicators as of 0650:

• Stock index futures are not doing much with only the Russell 2000 that tracks small caps moving at all from the break-even point and that is down 0.3%;

• Bonds are seeing some bids. The 2-year yield is down 4 basis points to 3.62% whilst the 10-year is down 6bps to 3.75% (yields move inversely to prices);

• Commodities are unphased by the strike. WTI crude oil is down 0.5% to trade close to $68/barrel with copper futures unchanged;

• Cryptos aren’t doing anything either. Bitcoin trades around $64,000, unchanged.

Today’s Known Events

We kick things off with some earnings:

• Spices company McCormick & Co. (MKC 0.00%↑) just beat on top- and bottom-line estimates and the stock is moving higher in the pre-market, up ~3% at the time of this writing;

• Acuity Brands (AYI 0.00%↑) earlier also beat top- and bottom-line estimates and that stock too is up in the pre-market;

• Paychex (PAYX 0.00%↑) and United Natural Foods (UNFI 0.00%↑ ) are also due to report before the open at 0930;

• After the close at 1600 we’ll hear from Nike (NKE 0.00%↑) and Lamb Weston (LW 0.00%↑). Maybe a good time to revisit what we said about LW back in July, the last time they reported earnings.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS, is out at 1000. Economists expect 7.6 million (just about) job openings, a small drop from the 7.7 million recorded last month. The quits levels were a little less than 3.3 million last month, corresponding to 2.1% of the workforce. That’s a slight increase from the previous month when the quits level was an even 2.0%. There unfortunately isn’t an economist estimate for that.

At the same time as JOLTS we’ll get the ISM Manufacturing PMI. The expectation here is a reading of 47.6, a slight increase over the 47.2 recorded last month but still below the 50 level that separates expansion from contraction.

Construction spending also out at 1000. This is expected to increase by 0.2% month-over-month after dropping by 0.3% last month.