Emily Flippen

It does feel like, to me, with so few trading days left in the year, that it's unlikely that the market

could go higher from here, given all the headwinds that you just mentioned.

One of the companies that I follow pretty closely is a business called Paycom.

They manage payroll processing.

They reported earnings earlier this week.

But one of the things that Paycom noted is, obviously, as a payroll processing company, they depend pretty heavily on

how many times companies are processing their payroll.

So if companies are going through stuff like layoffs, that has a tangible impact on their business.

And they're seeing that firsthand as companies go through these late layoffs into this part of the year.

We talked about it last week on the show.

But employers typically don't like to lay people off this late into the year because it's a bad look to do so during the holidays.

But this year tends to be or seems to be the exception.

And even Paycon themselves are going through the process of laying people off.

And it seems like AI is this broad excuse for why people are doing that.

It's kind of like, oh, well, we're automating.

But in reality, I have to wonder how much of that is actually true.

If there already wasn't a lot of influx of hiring coming out of the pandemic, and if companies aren't already looking to just kind of cut costs right now, it seems like given the economic environment we're living in, it makes a lot of sense that layoffs are happening right now.

We probably haven't seen the worst of tariffs.

Inflation is still a big question mark.

And heading into what seems to be a potentially weak holiday season, I'm not surprised at all that the market is finally down.