JOLTS Drops to Lowest Levels in 3+ Years

Mark Vickery
·3-min read

Tuesday, June 4th, 2024

The April JOLTS report came out this morning. Kicking off a new Jobs Week, the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey was demonstrably lower: 8.06 million was a big drop from the downwardly revised 8.36 million for March. This is the lowest single month since February 2021 — ahead of the Great Reopening, but after the worst effects of the Covid pandemic. The U.S. government report said there were 1.2 open positions for every single job seeker.

Job Quits stayed at +2.2% for a sixth-straight month. They totaled 3.51 million for the period, and combined with 4.52 million layoffs, make up the “separations” designation in this JOLTS report. This layoffs tally is the lowest single month since December of 2022. We see these numbers reflecting a slower employment scenario based on these metrics, and we look to see measured drawdowns continuing as the labor market slows. We also look for other jobs data this week to back up these findings, at least to a certain extent.

Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike CRWD beat estimates on both top and bottom lines in its Q1 reported this afternoon. Earnings of 93 cents per share beat expectations by 4 cents — and well ahead of the 57 cents per share reported in the year-ago quarter. Revenues of $921 million swept past the $905 million anticipated from the Zacks consensus. Also, current-quarter guidance is up 8-9 cents per share on the bottom line to 98-99 cents per share, while sales guidance is up moderately to a range of $958-961 million from the $956 million originally projected. The company has no earnings misses in its five-year publicly traded history.

Hewlett Packard Enterprises HPE performed even better, up +10% in late trading. Its fiscal Q2 report notched earnings of 42 cents per share, for a four-cent earnings beat. Revenues of $7.2 billion outstripped the $6.8 billion in the Zacks consensus for the Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) stock with a Zacks Style Score of B. AI cumulative sales reached $4.6 billion — solid profitability the the all-important segment. Guidance is in-line for the ongoing quarter, but ratcheted up on both sales and earnings for the full year.

Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein parent PVH PVH also reported earnings after the bell today. In its Q1, the company posted an easy beat on both earnings — $2.45 per share versus $2.14 expected — on sales of $1.95 billion, ahead of the $1.93 billion anticipated. Next-quarter guidance on the top line, however, is now expected to come down between 6-7% for the ongoing quarter. Part of the reason for the earnings beat is that the company re-established lower guidance a couple weeks back. That’s the way to only have two earnings misses in the past five years.

Private-sector payrolls from ADP are out tomorrow ahead of the bell. Automatic Data Processing ADP jobs numbers are expected to come down to 175K from 192K a month ago. As of now, it appears we reached a trough in private-sector employment from late last summer through the start of this year; the past three months have come back up again — not to garish highs of the Great Reopening a few years ago, but neither toward any crash-landing in the private-sector labor market.

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