The ADP jobs report: A must-know guide for ETF investors

The ADP National Employment report

The ADP National Employment Report (also popularly known as “the ADP Jobs Report” or “ADP Employment Report”) is a monthly report summarizing the employment situation. It’s sponsored by Automatic Data Processing (or ADP) and was originally developed and maintained by Macroeconomic Advisers, LLC. The report’s methodology was revised in November 2012 by Moody’s Analytics.

So the ADP Jobs Report is published monthly by the ADP Research Institute in close collaboration with Moody’s. It’s available two days prior to the release of the Employment Situation Report issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (or BLS). ADP contracted with Moody’s Analytics to compute a monthly report that would ultimately help to predict monthly non-farm payrolls from the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s employment situation. The ADP report only covers private (excluding government) payrolls.

It provides a monthly snapshot of U.S. non-farm private sector employment based on actual transactional payroll data.

How is the ADP employment report computed?

The report is a measure of non-farm private sector employment, which is obtained through an anonymous subset of roughly 400,000 U.S. businesses that are clients of ADP. During the 12 months, this subset is averaged over U.S. business clients and over U.S. employees working in all private industrial sectors.

The ADP National Employment Report is based on payroll data from over half of ADP’s U.S. business clients. The data represents about 24 million employees from all 19 of the major North American Industrial Classification (or NAICS) private industrial sectors.

The performances of industrial ETFs like the SPDR Industrial Select Sector Fund (XLI), which has companies like General Electric Co. (GE) and Boeing Co. (BA) in its portfolio, the Vanguard Industrials Index Fund (VIS), and the iShares Dow Jones US Industrial Sector Index Fund (IYJ) also serve as a good indicator of the industrial sector.

The next part of this series highlights statistics from the recent ADP employment report that came out on Wednesday, April 2.