May 4, 2024 | Labor Market Payrolls, Job Openings, Microsoft and AI and Starbucks

Smart Investing with Brent & Chase Wilsey

Labor Market payrolls

Nonfarm payrolls increased by 175,000 in the month of April. While this was well below the estimate of 240,000, this may actually be a big positive. Having that type of growth still shows the labor market is on good footing, but to combat the Fed’s inflation concerns it’s nice to see a labor market that is not too hot. Previous revisions also weren’t major considering March was revised up by 12,000 to a gain of 315,000 and February was revised lower by 34,000 to a gain of 236,000. Areas of strength included health care and social assistance (+87K), transportation and warehousing (+20.1K), and retail trade (+20.1K). Some areas actually saw minor losses including mining and logging (-3K), professional and business services (-4K), and information (-8K). With wage inflation being a major concern, I’d say the biggest data point was average hourly earnings growth of 3.9% missed the expectation of 4.0%. This was a decline from March’s reading of 4.1% and actually marked the lowest reading since the Fed starting hiking interest rates in 2022. Overall, I was quite pleased with the job numbers as I believe it shows a cooling labor market that remains healthy.

Job Openings

At the end of March job openings totaled 8.5 million. This missed the estimate of 8.7 million and was lower compared to the previous month’s reading of 8.8 million. Compared to last year, job openings were down 1.1 million. While this all sounds like bad news, I believe this is a positive. To start, pre-covid we had never seen a reading of over 8 million job openings, which means there is still plenty of available work for those that are looking. Also, when there were too many available jobs it created more competition for workers, which many times leads to wage pressures and in theory puts pressure on inflation. The labor market has remained resilient, but I believe we need to continue to see some softening to assist with inflationary concerns. This report came after the employment cost index spooked markets as it rose 1.2% in the first three months of the year versus an expectation of 1%. Compared to last year’s first quarter, wages and benefits rose 4.2%, which matched Q4’s reading and is off the multidecade high of 5.1% in 2022. Wages make up about 70% of employment costs and they increased 4.3% compared to last year, while benefit costs increased 3.7%. One other note to consider is that union workers saw a larger increase than non-union employees in the quarter. As we lap the impact from the union negotiations that concluded late last year, we will likely see a smaller increase from union jobs in the report.

Microsoft and OpenAI

I’m very curious to see how lawsuits against Microsoft and OpenAI over copyright infringement play out. Late last year the New York Times announced a lawsuit and now eight newspaper publishers in California, Colorado, Illinois, Florida, Minnesota, and New York have claimed Microsoft and OpenAI used millions of their articles without payment or permission. All eight publishers fall under the ownership of hedge fund Alden Global Capital and include names like the Denver Post, Chicago Tribune, and the New York Daily News. “The current GPT-4 LLM will output near-verbatim copies of significant portions of the publishers’ works when prompted to do so,” the complaint said. It also showed several examples of ChatGPT and the Copilot allegedly doing so. If these companies are able to win, I worry it could open the floodgates and other content providers could then claim the same infractions. ChatGPT also received more bad news with competitor Anthropic announcing its first enterprise offering and a free iPhone app. Anthropic was founded by ex-OpenAI research executives and has backers that include Amazon, Google, and Salesforce. Its Claude 3 model can reportedly summarize up to about 150,000 words and convert the large data sets into summaries in the form of a memo, letter or story. For comparison, ChatGPT can handle about 3,000 words. Overall, the AI space remains very early on to try and pick winners and I believe many investors will be disappointed a few years down the road as they unfortunately picked the wrong horse to bet on.

Starbucks

Have you not been drinking as much Starbucks as you used to? The 52 week high for the stock is $109.72, but after reporting earnings the stock fell to $74.44. This was a 32.2% drop from the high. The company is struggling with their competitor in China, Luckin Coffee, and Starbucks saw a 11% decline in same store sales year over year. Starbucks has ambitious plans to roll out new beverages and increase their efficiency to bring back lost customers. Investors should note that there are union negotiations going on for 410 stores in the US, which could increase their labor cost and perhaps slow down their efficiency. In my opinion, even with this pull back it's still not a bargain as it still trades at almost 20 times earnings. We will do an analysis of Starbucks during our radio show and podcast on Saturday, May 11th after the numbers settle down and we can better view the company going forward.

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