Friends
After yesterday’s drubbing, stocks seemed poised to post a third down day in a row as the Dow was down a spooky 117 points in early trading. But the afternoon brought with it a reversal, as some major technical levels held, and stocks staged an impressive comeback. The weekly jobless claims number was decent, but everyone seems to be focused on the all-important non-farm payroll number that comes out tomorrow morning.
We’ll get back to the jobs number in a moment, but for the day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 80 points to close at 15,040. The S&P 500 was up 13 points to finish the day at 1622. Gold was up $13 to trade at $1411 per ounce, while oil was up $.88 to trade at $94.62 per barrel WTI.
Back to the employment number tomorrow. Consensus estimates have the number coming in at about 165,000 to 170,000 new jobs to have been created. I’ll go with 137,000 new jobs. If I am close, I will be bragging about it tomorrow. If I am way off then I will pretend I never mentioned it. As for the markets, I have no idea if a good number is good or not. You know the whole story, where good might mean the Fed tapers and bad means the Fed remains all in. I am starting to believe the markets are beginning to fall into our camp. We want a good number. If stocks fall a bit on that, so be it. It won’t last. At some point good news will actually be good news. Hopefully, then, we can have a stock market built on a solid foundation of growth as opposed to simply begging for the drug of Fed intervention.
We’ll talk tomorrow. Have a nice evening everyone.
