Dow Jumps Over 500 Day After Fed Cuts Rates

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White collar workers show why US jobs openings data is riddled with red flags

If you look at job openings, you’d think professional and business services are doing much better than the rest of the job market. They aren’t.

Luke Kawa

10/2/24 12:56PM

The US job openings and labor turnover survey showed an unexpectedly large jump in postings for August, up to over 8 million.

Openings in government, construction, and trade, transportation, and utilities sectors drove this increase, but there was another surprising sector that moved up meaningfully as well: professional and business services.

Stepping back, job openings in professional and business services are virtually flat year-on-year (down 30,000, or -2%), while total job openings are down a whopping 14%.

That must mean demand for labor is stronger in professional and business services than the economy as a whole, right?

This sector amounts to roughly 15% of total employment, but has accounted for just 5% of net job growth over the past year. Payroll growth in this sector is well below-average.

Ah. Well. Perhaps this is a case of a sector-specific labor shortage, and employers simply being unable to find qualified people to fill those positions. But if that were happening, we’d expect better pay growth in this industry to entice workers to stay put rather than head for greener pastures. And that’s not playing out either, judging by the Employment Cost Index’s wage data.

So this is an instance of the internals of the job openings data being incongruent with most other metrics we have on the state of the labor market. And if it’s job openings against the world, I’ll take the world. Couple that with the overall very low response rate for this survey (in the low-30s% since mid-2022) and it’s yet another example of the pitfalls that await those who put job openings front-and-center in their jobs market analyses.

I have not been a fan of the Federal Reserve’s use of job openings – or the ratio of job openings to unemployed Americans – as a good catch-all metric for labor market conditions over the past few years. A few more reasons:

The ratio of job openings to unemployment has clear cyclical elements – going up when the economy is good and down when it is less good – but it has also trended higher over time. This is telling me there is something about the nature of job openings that evolved over time (i.e., it is easier to do so).
A lot of net monthly job growth comes from people who weren’t even in the labor force and looking for a job a month ago. This means the available pool of labor is always larger than what the headline number of unemployed would imply.
The ratio of vacancies to unemployed tends to track the private sector quits rate over time, and quitting is a real action. There’s the phrase about the classic bacon-and-eggs breakfast: the chicken was involved, the pig was committed. Given the difference in power dynamics, a worker quitting a job sends a much stronger signal about labor market conditions than a company posting a job opening.
Job openings are a nearly costless call option for employers to see if The Perfect Candidate is out there. You have the ability to find a great hire, but no obligation to react to resumes that come in. This feeling has been reinforced by my work experience, where I’ve seen job postings linger for no apparent reason, long after the role had been filled.

[And an aside to the analysts who have suggested “just de-trend JOLTS to normalize for the upward drift over time” – now may be a bit of a rubber meets the road time for that thesis, since there’s a nascent disconnect between job openings (moving sideways-ish) and the private sector quits rate (down to 2015 levels).]

Tasha Matsumoto

11/14/25

Despite a modest rebound in tech, the S&P 500 closes slightly lower

The S&P 500 managed to erase most of its early morning losses through the session.

Matt Phillips11/14/25

Speculative stocks rebound from early sell-off

As we head toward the last hour of a wild week of trading, the buckle-up vibes the market started out with Friday have mellowed into a modestly positive day, with the Invesco QQQ Trust and the SPDR S&P 500 ETF both in the green.

But the volatility was pretty wild for some of the high-beta momentum stocks that have taken some of the worst beatings in recent days.

Shares like Applied Digital and Bloom Energy saw cumulative swings on the day along the lines of 20 percentage points. Even those that haven’t quite managed to stay positive, like IREN and Oklo, have nonetheless erased sizable losses.

Why? Frankly, it’s impossible to say. The same uncertainties that the market was facing yesterday — doubts about further rate hikes, confusion about the state of the economy, jitters about the potential for the AI boom to turn into a bust — are still hovering out there somewhere. Perhaps it will take more than a 2-percentage point drop from record highs for the major indexes — about the extent of the recent sell-off — to dull the retail reflex to buy the dip.

Luke Kawa11/14/25

Micron spikes on report that Samsung hiked memory chip prices by as much as 60%

Memory chip specialist Micron is soaring after Reuters reported that Samsung has raised prices of select memory chips by as much as 60% since September, citing two people with knowledge of the price changes.

Memory chips play a key supporting role in the AI boom by feeding high-powered GPUs with data to process.

Micron, the biggest US memory chip seller, has been on an absolute tear, more than doubling in price since the end of August. Shares recently traded more than 15% above the average analyst price target, a record based on data going back to 2007.

These days, you need a pretty good memory to keep up with all the bullish news flow surrounding memory chip stocks, whether it’s been reports of imminent price hikes for these chips, South Korean memory giant SK Hynix already being sold out of all its 2026 production, or Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang nodding at shortages of these valuable components.

Max Knoblauch11/14/25

Warner Bros. Discovery rises as potential sale boils down to bidding war between Paramount, Comcast, and Netflix

The potential sale of Warner Bros. Discovery appears to have boiled down to three contenders: Paramount Skydance, Comcast, and Netflix.

All three entertainment giants are prepping bids for WBD, with a deadline of next Thursday for first-round offers, according to Wall Street Journal reporting. Warner Bros. shares climbed more than 2% in premarket trading on Friday.

Per the WSJ, Comcast and Netflix are mostly interested in WBD’s streaming assets, while Paramount — which is said to have had three offers rejected already — wants to buy the whole company.

According to people familiar with the companies’ plans, Paramount believes it has the clearest path toward regulatory approval, as it thinks Netflix’s cofounder, Reed Hastings, having supported Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election could be a significant hurdle in getting a deal approved, per the WSJ.

Exclusive | Paramount, Comcast, Netflix Prepare Bids for Warner as Deadline Approaches

Per the WSJ, Comcast and Netflix are mostly interested in WBD’s streaming assets, while Paramount — which is said to have had three offers rejected already — wants to buy the whole company.

Luke Kawa11/14/25

Beyond Meat’s refinancing efforts that spurred meme stock rally now have shares down 67%

Well, with a bit of time and a lot of volatility, the dust is settling on how Beyond Meat’s refinancing efforts have gone.

This morning, management announced that its new 2030 notes could be converted at a price of about $1.7459, or around 85% above where shares are trading in the premarket in the midst of another big retreat.

The twists and turns that brought us here:

On September 29, the company announced its intention to replace $1.15 billion in convertible notes due in 2027 (with an interest rate of 0%) with a mix of stock and up to $202.5 million in new second lien convertible notes due in 2030 (with an interest rate of 7%). Prior to that, its stock closed at $2.85.

Shortly after management reached a deal with 97% of its 2027 noteholders in mid-October, Beyond Meat became a meme stock. Despite massive dilution that raised the company’s share count by more than 300% and made prior noteholders the new corporate owners, retail traders positioned for a potential short squeeze in the shares, thinking the refinancing would give the company a new lease on life.

Shares rose from a closing low of $0.52 on October 16 to an intermediate closing peak of $3.62 on October 21 — a near 600% rally in just three sessions. That propelled shares to well above where they were trading before these refinancing plans were announced. But the true frenzied zenith for Beyond Meat came the next session, when the stock more than doubled intraday on what were then record volumes of above 2 billion, only to ultimately close slightly lower. The air came out of the balloon almost immediately thereafter.

(A fun aside: in calculating the conversion rate for the 2030 convertible notes, management deems that day to have been a “market disruption event,” which removes it from the calculations and makes the conversion price lower than it otherwise would have been.)

Shares tanked on October 23 on heavy volumes, and then interest and trading activity in Beyond continued to wane — along with its share price. Delaying the release of Q3 results as management tried to figure out how big of a write-down to take and then issuing those numbers along with a weak Q4 sales outlook did nothing to change the narrative.

There’s no reason to think those 2030 notes will be converted any time soon, based on where the stock is trading. Because these 2030 notes provide the opportunity for “payment in kind” and Beyond is in a relatively stressed financial position, interest on these notes can be paid not just with cash but also (more likely) through the issuance of more stock or the accumulation of more debt.

In sum: Beyond Meat eliminated about $800 million in debt and all it got in exchange was a 67% decline in its stock price, a longer runway to make processed peas into faux meat, and an entertaining (and for those who bought into the meme rally without exiting at the right time, painful) story.