The Reckoning for Friday’s Jobs Report

The stock market is getting its first chance to react to Friday’s lousy jobs report, and not surprisingly, it’s not happy. The Dow is down 140 points and the S&P 500 is below 1,380.

The cyclicals and financials are taking most of the hits. The gold market is up which makes sense if traders expect the Fed will be more accommodative (though it’s kinda hard to be any more accommodative at this point). The bond market is also rallying.

This could be the fourth down day in a row for the market. Plus, it would finally snap the “up, up, down, down, down” trend of the past three weeks. Still, this isn’t that much of a drop. We’re currently off about 2.7% from the 44-month high we made last Monday.

I said that the stock market had two hurdles coming — one was the jobs report and the second was earnings season. Wall Street clearly didn’t like the first, so now it’s up to the second. As I’ve said, I expect the market to bounce around for a few weeks until we have a clearer picture of what the second half of 2012 will look like. That’s why I’m not only focusing on earnings but also on company guidance.

Posted by on April 9th, 2012 at 10:18 am


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