Good morning, everyone. I got up at the ungodly late hour of 5:50 this morning, partly because I finally went to see Avatar 3-d last night, and partly because I admit to more than a little apprehension about what the jobs report was going to do with the market. I'm a skosh shell-shocked after the past ten months, although I'm re-reading all the trading psychology books I have to brush up on the mental angle of trading.
But here's the interesting thing: the storyline everyone seemed to be expecting was something like this:
(1) The jobs report would show the first net gain in jobs for the first time in two years (this was repeated so often, it was dispensed as a Gospel truth)
(2) Even though the net gain – say, 15,000 jobs – would be statistically insignificant, it would be a huge morale-boost
(3) The market would react in some funky way; perhaps exploding higher due to exuberance about our "healed" economy, or perhaps plunging due to fears the Fed would start pushing rates higher.
Well, good ol' Ms. Market decided to surprise everyone, and instead said, "Sure! You want a jobs gain? Here's a big ol' 4,000 net new jobs in November, with my revised information. Oh, while I've got your attention, here's a loss of 85,000 jobs in December. What, that's not what you were expecting? Tough."
So the /ES is down 4 as I am typing this. In a normal environment, I imagine the /ES would be getting crushed right now, since the economy obviously (OBVIOUSLY) still uber-sucks. But things have, shall we say, a somewhat bullish bias over the past ten months.
I find the /NQ chart (intraday) kind of interesting right now too:
The movement over the course of today should be pretty fascinating, as the public digests this news.
