ADP Report = 238,000 Jobs

Wall Street is intensely focused on this Friday’s jobs report. The last few reports have been pretty good, and investors are curious if we’ll see more of the same. We got a sneak peak today when ADP, the private payroll firm, said that 238,000 net new jobs were added to the economy last month. That’s not bad, but I hasten to add that ADP isn’t always the best forecaster of what the government will say. For Friday, the consensus on the Street is for a gain of 195,000 jobs.

Turning to our Buy List, Ford Motor ($F), is getting a nice lift today after Alan Mulally said that he won’t be taking the CEO spot at Microsoft ($MSFT), another Buy List stock. I thought this was pretty obvious, but there were folks who thought it was a done deal. Shares of Ford got as high as $15.71 today.

Later today, the Fed will release the minutes from its last meeting. This is the meeting at which the Fed finally decided to taper its bond purchases. I’m curious about what the discussion was. (Remember that Fed minutes are a nice lesson is the use of indefinite pronouns—“some” said, “many” said, “a few” dissented from that.)

Not much else is going on. After today’s close, Bed Bath & Beyond ($BBBY) will report its fiscal Q3 earnings. The company has told us to expect earnings to range between $1.11 and $1.16 per share. They’ve also said that earnings for the current quarter, which is not quite halfway done, will range between $1.70 and $1.77 per share. It will be interesting to see if they adjust that forecast.

Posted by on January 8th, 2014 at 10:51 am


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