10:01a U.S. job openings rise to 7.08 million from 6.96 million prior month
Highlights
Job openings totaled 7.079 million in November, up 1.7 percent vs 6.96 million in October and just shy of August's record of 7.293 million. The current number of openings is more than 1 million above the number of unemployed who have been actively looking for work, at 6.075 million in a direct comparison with October that since fell to 5.975 million in last week's employment report for November. The number of job openings first broke above the number of unemployed back in April this year and have been inversion ever since. This points to tight conditions in the labor market and, for the Federal Reserve, raises the risk of an upturn in wage inflation.
Hires, which have been lagging openings, did rise 3.4 percent in October but, at 5.892 million, also remain more than 1 million below openings. The risk of increasing scarcity of labor is highlighted by year-on-year rates, at a 16.8 percent increase for openings vs only a 5.2 percent increase in hires. This separation underscores a stubborn feature of the 2018 economy: lack of quality labor, that employers are having a hard time finding the people they want.
One alarm, however, that is not sounding is the number of quits which fell 1.4 percent to 3.514 million from September with the year-on-year rate, at 5.7 percent, only slightly elevated. Federal Reserve officials keep their eye on the number of quits for clues on wage inflation and whether workers are shifting to higher paying jobs.
12:30PM TD Ameritrade IMX 5.27 actual vs 6.10 prior
Highlights
A move out of equities by TD Ameritrade clients and into less volatile securities including bonds made for a sharp drop in the investor movement index, to 5.27 in November vs 6.10 in October. The drop indicates less momentum in the stock market. Tesla and Starbucks were sold on net by Ameritrade clients in November with Amazon and Apple remaining popular buys.
Definition
The Investor Movement Index, (or the IMX), is a proprietary, behavior-based index created by TD Ameritrade designed to provide insight into Main Street sentiment. The IMX measures what investors are actually doing, and how they are actually positioned in the markets. The IMX does this by using data representing the holdings/positions, trading activity and other data from an anonymous sample from six million funded accounts. These data are used to create a snapshot that can be monitored over time, or compared to other market indicators, to suggest the current sentiment of the real portfolios held by retail investors.
Dan 
