Wednesday, September 2nd, 2026

Pre-market futures are mostly up but mildly mixed at this hour, minutes following the latest jobs report release, and after three-straight days of major indexes closing in the red. The Dow is +125 points at this hour, the S&P 500 is +5, the Nasdaq -33 points and the small-cap Russell 2000 +4.

The blue-chip Dow is currently led by AppleAAPL after its transition from CEO Tim Cook to former Apple Hardware VP John Ternus, and ChevronCVX as Venezuelan oil becomes available and the U.S. and Iran continue to trade blows in and around the Strait of Hormuz. The WTI spot oil price is $89 per barrel (/bbl) at this hour, with Brent crude up to $94/bbl.

Jobs Week Continues: ADP Sees +38K New Jobs Filled

It's so far been an underwhelming "Jobs Week" — following yesterday's less-than-expected 7.2 million job openings for July's JOLTS report, this morning's private-sector payrolls from Automatic Data ProcessingADP reached only +38K new jobs filled for August. This is below the +47K anticipated and the unrevised +44K from the prior month; in fact, it's the weakest tally since January.

Services carried the full load of new private-sector hires: +48K, versus a loss of -10K from Goods-producing jobs. Small firms (sub-50 employees) hired the most, +23K, followed by large businesses (more than 500 employees) with +13K. Medium-sized companies hired +8K.

By sector, Education/Healthcare led, unsurprisingly, with +45K new hires in August. This was followed by Leisure/Hospitality at a distant second: +16K, and Construction third, +12K. Professional/Business Services lost -16K positions and Manufacturing -17K. We haven't seen negative jobs gains from ADP in over a year, but the overall labor market looks pretty flat over the past three years.

Friday's non-farm payrolls from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is projected to grow by +53K jobs in August, which would be a solid bounce-back from the negative -23K in July. It would also be the first move up in the past five months of BLS jobs data. While these figures have been a bit more volatile month over month, we still look pretty flat going back to the start of 2025: +23K new jobs have been created per month, on average, since that time.

What to Expect from the Stock Market Today

After today's open, Factory Ordersfor July come out. These are expected to rebound to +0.7% from a disappointing -0.3% reported for June. At 2pm, the Fed puts out its latest Beige Book— an economic summary from each of its 12 districts, released eight times per year. 

Also, just when you thought earnings season was over, BroadcomAVGO reports quarterly results after today's close. They will be joined by Hewlett-Packard EnterprisesHPE, cloud storage major SnowflakeSNOW and Calvin Klein/Tommy Hilfiger parent PVH Corp.PVH, among others.

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