Market comments for Oct. 7th, 2011

The Unemployment Rate stayed steady at 9.1% for September, as reported this morning. Non-Farm payrolls came in better than expected with a gain of 103,000 new jobs created. And on Thursday morning, Initial Jobless Claims came in at 401K for the week of 10/1.

This morning I have included several charts showing that while there is much volatility, there also is a pattern to the moves. AS you can see from the charts below, we are forming lower highs and new lower lows in this market. Will this continue? It's anybody's guess. I guess it will and while todays market looks tired with the recent gains, we may have put in the highs and are headed lower.


Also today I am posting from the Chart of the Day, which shows how slow this recovery has been compared to other recoveries.

"Today's chart puts the latest data into perspective by comparing nonfarm payrolls following the end of the latest economic recession (i.e. the Great Recession -- solid red line) to that of the prior recession (i.e. 2001 recession -- dashed gold line) to that of the average post-recession from 1954-2000 (dashed blue line). As today's chart illustrates, the current jobs recovery is much weaker than the average jobs recovery that follows the end of a recession. Today's chart also illustrates that the current jobs recovery has been slightly stronger than what occurred following the recession of 2001. However, the already modest upward trend has slowed significantly over the past five months."

Unemployment Rate rises to 9.1%!!

The Unemployment rate for May rose to 9.1%. Wednesday I made a prediction that the rate was going to rise to this level and that could be what others in the market expected, hence the selloff two days ago. This will have a very negative impact on the stock market today and continue the downtrend of lower lows, followed by lower highs.

Non-Farm Payrolls for May were 54K jobs added. Expectations were for 169K. In April it was reported we added 244K new Non-Farm jobs, but today, that number was revised down to 232K.

These data released today combined with previous data this week of a much lower Consumer Confidence (60.8 vs. 66 in April) and much lower Chicago PMI number (56.6 vs. 67.6 in April) have the Futures market for the Dow down -142. This is going to be a rough day for the Bulls and a rough week as well.

Next week this trend will continue!

Market comments for Nov. 5th

The economic data released today was one of the best months we have seen in a long time. Yet, so far today, the market response has been muted with the Dow down a few points as well as the S&P and the Nasdaq. here's the highlights of the data.

The Unemployment rate for Oct. remained at 9.6%. Over 159,000 Private sector jobs were added in October. This makes 10 straight months of Private Sector job creation has occurred. That makes over 1.5 million jobs created so far in the past year.

Non Farm payrolls increased 151,000 jobs for October. Hourly Earnings increased 0.2%, while the Average workweek increased to 34.3 hours in October from 34.2 hours for Sept.

Pending Home Sales data will be released in 15 minutes and later this afternoon, Consumer Credit data will be released.

The Dow is down about 13 points right now as I publish this post.