Today's Scoop:

Hey friends - hope the week is off to a good start!

Note from the Founder: We’re back! Thanks for your patience last week while I took some time to get married. It was awesome. Now, we have an exciting month ahead for Share Scoops!

Here’s what you need to know today…

1. Companies are still hiring, particularly in healthcare and finance.

2. There are way more job openings than normal.

3. Wages are starting to catch up to rising living costs.

S&P 500: 4,518.44
1Mo: +2% | 1Yr: +9% | 5Yr: +60%

The market drifted higher today but has mostly moved sideways over the past week. Investors are parsing through corporate financial reports that are mostly better than feared.

Companies are still hiring, and unemployment is at record lows. The Labor Department’s July jobs report [🤓] indicated the unemployment rate fell to 3.5%, one of the lowest levels in over fifty years. Overall hiring is still in-line with pre-pandemic levels, picking up in services sectors. Healthcare and finance companies ramped up onboarding in July. Travel and leisure industry hiring has slowed significantly from the surge earlier in the year.

Wages are finally catching up to rising living costs. The Labor Department reported average hourly earnings rose 0.4% in July, marking a 4.4% increase over the past twelve months. We’ll get the official July inflation report on Thursday, but living costs are up only 3.0% over twelve months through June. Over the past two years, our incomes have mostly lost purchasing power.

There are still a lot more unfilled job openings than usual. The Labor Department’s JOLTS report [🤓] indicated companies had more than 9.5M unfilled positions at the end of June. That’s down from the peak of 12M last March, but still well above the ~7M average before the pandemic. There are still nearly two open positions for every unemployed person.

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How to understand who’s hiring and firing

There are four main reports people watch to understand trends in the labor market.

The main "jobs report" comes from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on the first Friday of each month. It highlights the unemployment rate, new jobs added, and wage growth.

The Labor Department also releases the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) each month but on a one-month lag. That report helps us understand how many open positions there are, how many people quit their jobs, and how many were hired.

There's also a monthly private-sector survey from payroll services company ADP that doesn't include government jobs and the weekly initial unemployment claims (a proxy for layoffs) report from the Labor Department.

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