Powell Speech, JOLTS

Good morning contrarians! Welcome to the Daily Contrarian, our morning look at events likely to move markets. It is Tuesday, July 2. The Bottom Line segment of today’s podcast starts at (4:07) for listeners who want to skip ahead.

State of Play

It was a quiet Monday, as anticipated. As we look at our board of indicators at 0645, risk appetite appears to be abating a bit:

• Stock index futures are pointing to a lower open, with small caps leading the drop. The Russell 2000 is down 0.7% with Nasdaq futures down 0.5% and S&P 500 down 0.4%;

• Commodities are gaining a bit, with WTI crude oil up 0.7% to trade around $84/barrel and copper up 0.5%;

• Bonds aren’t doing anything with the 2-year yielding 4.76% and the 10-year 4.45%. Bonds have dropped recently;

• Cryptos are unchanged with Bitcoin trading around $62,700.

Today’s Known Events

Fed Chair Jerome Powell speaks at 0930 at the European Central Bank Forum on Central Banking in Portugal. The proceedings will be broadcast live on the ECB website. This is unlikely to be the stage for a major policy announcement from Powell, but you never know.

We’ll then get the the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS, is out at 1000. Economists expect 7.86 million job openings, a drop from the 8.06 million recorded last month. The quits levels were 3.5 million at last month’s reading, corresponding to 2.2% of the workforce. There unfortunately isn’t an economist estimate for that.