Looking Ahead to Friday’s Jobs Report

The big event for the markets this week will be Friday’s jobs report for April. This will be an interesting one because the report for March was quite poor. It’s hard for me to say what will happen. The last initial claims report was very strong. This morning, the ADP report said that the economy created 169,000 new private sector jobs last month. That was below forecasts of 205,000. The consensus for Friday’s report is for 220,000 jobs.

The bond market has been drifting lower over the past three weeks. On April 17, the 10-year yielded as low as 1.845%. The yield has climbed in the last seven days in a row, and it recently broke above 2.2%. That’s still low, but it’s higher than where it was.

The price of oil has also slowly climbed higher. On March 17, West Texas Intermediate got as low as $42.41 per barrel. It’s risen almost nonstop since then. Oil closed at $60.67 yesterday and it’s up again today. That’s a jump of more than 40% in just a few weeks.

Yesterday, Fiserv (FISV) closed out earnings season for our Buy List with a three-cent earnings beat. The shares are up about 2% in early trading. Hormel (HRL) and Ross Stores (ROST) ended their quarters in April so they should report their earnings in a few weeks.

Posted by on May 6th, 2015 at 10:02 am


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