Netflix pops, Fed minutes on deck — What you need to know in markets on Wednesday
It was Turnaround Tuesday on Wall Street.
After a red close to open the week on Monday stocks started to claw back some of their losses from last week’s sharp sell-off during Tuesday’s session as each of the major indices rose more than 2%.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq led the way, rising 214 points, or 2.9%, while the Dow and S&P 500 both rose 2.1% and the small cap Russell 2000 jumped 2.8%.
Markets on Tuesday also got a sense of where the IPO might stand next year with The Wall Street Journal reporting that Uber has gotten proposals from banks that would value the company at up to $120 billion in an IPO while Lyft, Uber’s ride-sharing rival, has selected its underwriters for an expected public debut in the first half of 2019.
On Wednesday, stocks could potentially be looking at a boost from Netflix (NFLX) shares after the company reported an earnings beat and massive jump in streaming members after the market close on Tuesday.
In after hours trading on Tuesday Netflix was up as much as 12% after the company reported adding 6.96 million streaming members during the third quarter, more than the 5 million Netflix had expected and well above Wall Street’s expectations for the quarter.
“We strive to offer a wide breadth of programming because we want to maximize the size of our membership base and people have very diverse tastes that we seek to satisfy,” Netflix said in its quarterly letter to shareholders. “This also reduces our dependence on any individual title. Even our largest titles, which are viewed by tens of millions of our members, only account for a low single digit percentage of total streaming hours. Therefore, the vast majority of our growth in any given quarter is not attributable to any one piece of content, as you can see by the steadiness in our paid net additions.”
Now turning to the calendar for Wednesday, the earnings side will see things slowdown and the day’s main economic highlight should come in the afternoon when the Federal Reserve releases the minutes from its latest policy meeting at 2:00 p.m. ET. The economic calendar also brings investors the September reading on housing starts and building permits, with starts expected to be negatively impacted by Hurricane Florence.
And on the earnings side, notable companies slated to report results should include US Bancorp (USB), Abbot Labs (ABT), United Rentals (URI), Alcoa (AA), and Kinder Morgan (KMI), among others.
Job openings hit a record high
In August, a record number of jobs were available in the U.S.
Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics released Tuesday showed that over 7.1 million jobs were open in August, the last month this data is available for, to mark a new all-time high for the series that dates back to 2001.
At 4.6%, the job opening rate is at an all-time and has surged higher from a rate of 3.7% at the end of 2017. The quits rate also held in August at 2.4%, matching the highest level since February 2001. And for the sixth straight month there were more jobs open than people out of work; in 2010 there were more than 6 people out of work for each job available.
Combine this data with an unemployment rate currently at its lowest level since 1969 and it is a very good time to be looking for a job in America.
“If you’re currently looking for a job, the strong August JOLTS report suggests you have more negotiating power than you might think,” said Nick Bunker, an economist with job site Indeed.
“With 7.1 million job openings, employers are still looking to add workers, and the pool of potential hires continues to decline. Now more than ever, employers need to compete with each other to fill their vacancies — something that bodes well for the job seeker.”
And just this week, trucking firm J.B. Hunt (JBHT) said that for its contract-services unit wages are up about 10% in the last year to attract new workers. It is almost like wage gains will follow a very tight labor market!
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Myles Udland is a writer at Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter @MylesUdland
