Friends, The non-farm payroll number was a pleasant surprise this morning as the U. S. economy produced 200,000 new jobs in the month of December. The unemployment rate fell to 8.5%. Good day for the markets, right? Wrong. It looks like the traders made all their buys...

Friends We had some good news on the employment front this morning with the ADP private sector job number coming in at a whopping 325,000 new jobs for December (whopping for recent times anyway). In addition, the weekly new unemployment claim number once again came in...

Friends Well, 2012 starts out with a bang. Of course, quite often the first day of trading in the New Year is up big, so we won’t get too excited just yet (last four have all been up better than 1%). But hey, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up a nice 179 points...