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Briefing.com Summary:
*The Dow and S&P 500 have had a good run to start the year (and so has the broader market).
*ADP reported that private-sector employment increased by 41,000 jobs in December.
*The U.S. will be selling Venezuela's sanctioned oil.
2026 is off to a good start for the stock market. The Dow and S&P 500 have run to new record highs; cyclical sectors are leading the S&P 500; and small-cap stocks have outperformed as buying efforts have broadened out. There is a continuing speculative impulse in the market, too, evidenced by the leadership of the high-beta stocks and micro-cap stocks.
It's not that "happy days are here again"; it's that happy days never ended.
The bull market carries on in spite of the geopolitical drama and notwithstanding a possible Supreme Court ruling this Friday on President Trump's tariff authority, which would follow on the heels of the December employment report.
In short, there is a lot of sound and fury in the background, but in the foreground is a stock market that has kept calm and carried on. To that end, the CBOE Volatility Index is down 1.3% year-to-date.
That calmness has carried over to today. Currently, the S&P 500 futures are up one point and are trading in line with fair value, the Nasdaq 100 futures are down 35 points and are trading 0.1% below fair value, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average futures are up 80 points and are trading 0.2% above fair value.
A calm Treasury market has acted as an underlying support factor. The 2-yr note yield is down three basis points since the start of the year to 3.45%, and the 10-yr note yield is down four basis points since the start of the year to 4.13%.
The December ADP Employment Report didn't provide any excuse for upset. It showed private-sector employment increased by 41,000 jobs in December (Briefing.com consensus: 45,000), with the service-providing sector (44,000) accounting for the entirety of the overall gain, and small (9,000), medium (34,000), and large (2,000) establishments all adding jobs.
This was not a robust employment report. It is good that there were job increases, yet this report reflects a sense of hesitancy on the hiring front.
Other data out today will include the December ISM Non-Manufacturing Index (Briefing.com consensus: 52.2%; prior 52.6%), November Factory Orders (Briefing.com consensus: -1.0%; prior 0.2%), November JOLTS - Job Openings (prior 7.670 million), and November Business Inventories (prior 0.2%). Those reports will all be released at 10:00 a.m. ET.
Other corporate developments afoot this morning include Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) recommending shareholders reject the amended Paramount (PSKY) tender offer; Apogee Enterprises (APOG) disappointing with its earnings outlook; and MSCI announcing that it won't exclude digital asset treasury companies, such as Strategy (MSTR), from MSCI indexes.
CNBC, meanwhile, is reporting that Venezuelan oil will be "given" to the U.S., and the U.S. will sell the sanctioned oil, with the proceeds put in American banks and to be disbursed to Venezuela once things stabilize in the country. Additionally, U.S. sanctions against Venezuela will be rolled back as part of this process, which will effectively reduce the amount of oil China receives. It is doubtful that China will be happy about this, but for now China has kept calm without some type of retaliatory action.
