Tech Correction Gets Real, JOLTS, Earnings

Good morning contrarians! Welcome to the Daily Contrarian, our morning look at events likely to move markets. It is Tuesday, March 11. Today’s Stocks On The Contrarian Radar©️ features DAL 0.00%↑ and travel stocks at the bottom of this page.

State of Play

Stocks got beaten up yesterday, with the damage particularly acute in the tech sector. The Nasdaq dropped 4% for its worst day since 2022, sinking further into correction territory.

As we eye our board of indicators for signs of direction at 0705, risk appetite appears to be re-emerging:

• Stock index futures are showing some signs of life, led by small caps. The Russell 2000 is up 1%. S&P 500 and Nasdaq both 0.2% to the good;

• Commodities are rallying. Copper is up 1.5%. WTI crude oil is up 1% to trade around $66.70/barrel;

• Cryptos are flat. Bitcoin is unchanged just below $82,000;

• Bonds aren’t doing anything. The 10-year yields 4.21%.

Today’s Known Events

We start with earnings:

• Dick’s Sporting Goods (DKS 0.00%↑) just reported results that beat estimates. The company raised the dividend payout but the market so far is unimpressed as the stock is down 3.5% at the time of this writing;

• Kohl’s (KSS 0.00%↑), another mid-tier retailers, and cruiseline operator Viking Holdings (VIK 0.00%↑) also report before the open at 0930. More on travel stocks in a bit;

• United Natural Foods (UNFI 0.00%↑) is also due intermittently. Food companies did quite all right yesterday;

• Not much going on after the close: Smith Micro Software (SMSI 0.00%↑), Stitch Fix (SFIX 0.00%↑) and Casey’s General Stores (CASY 0.00%↑) are among the highlights.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, or JOLTS, is out at 1000. The expectation here is for 7.71 million job openings, a small increase over the 7.6 million recorded last month. The quits levels were about 3.2 million last month, corresponding to 2% of the workforce, basically the same as the previous month. There unfortunately isn’t an economist estimate for that.