Private payrolls rose by 98,000 in June. Economists expected more. They were wrong again. This marks the 47th consecutive month where economists have proven they cannot predict anything better than a drunk guy at a dartboard, yet we keep printing their forecasts like they matter.
Healthcare hired most of these people. Not tech. Not finance. Not the sectors your cousin won't shut up about at barbecues. Healthcare. The industry where you wait three hours to be told to lose weight. That's where the jobs went. Everyone's getting hired to tell you the same thing your bathroom scale already did for free.
The report came in below expectations. Retail traders saw this news and immediately checked their portfolios to see if it meant anything. It didn't. They checked again five minutes later. Still didn't. By market close they'd refreshed their brokerage app 19 times and convinced themselves they understood monetary policy because they watched a TikTok about the yield curve.
ADP releases this number every month. The actual government jobs report comes out days later and contradicts it. Then both numbers get revised three times over the next quarter until nobody remembers what the original figure was. This is the system we've all agreed to respect.
Somewhere right now a guy with $847 in a Robinhood account is explaining to his Hinge date why the ADP report validates his thesis on small-cap value rotation. She's pretending her phone just died. It didn't. She just remembered she has to return some videotapes.
The number was 98,000. Could've been 110,000. Could've been 85,000. The market moved 0.3% and then forgot why. By next month this report will be revised to 103,000 and exactly zero people will notice or care. But please, tell me more about how you're trading the employment data.
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