Friends
Never in the history of economic data has a number so surprised everyone. It was expected that today’s jobs number would show a loss of another 8 million jobs in May. Instead, the economy added 2.5 million jobs in May. The unemployment rate which was expected to be near 20%, actually came in at 13.3%. Now, that’s still a lot of jobs lost this year, but today’s numbers were just show stopping. Could the economy be recovering that quickly? Sure, the stock market has been trying to tell us things might be getting better quicker than we thought, but not many of us believed it. We’ll see if future jobs reports validate today’s stunner, but for now we’ll just be thankful.
As for stocks, it wasn’t a sell the news situation. Stocks rallied, continued to climb midday, took a breather in the afternoon, but still posted nice gains. At the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 829 points to finish the day at 27,110. The S&P500 was up 81 points to close at 3,193. Gold was down $40 to trade at $1,686 per ounce, while oil was up $1.90 to trade at $39.31 per barrel WTI.
It was a great week for stocks and today finally appeared to validate the bulls aggression. It is amazing to think that we have erased most of the decline we saw in late February and into March. Let’s enjoy it, but as always let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. There is still a lot of work to do to get this economy back anywhere close to where it was in January. One day at a time.
Have a great weekend everyone.
