Waiting Is The Hardest Part

The market was watching and waiting this morning as Oct jobs data was being released and to me it was almost like this market was ready to rally but just wanted to make sure the amount of jobs lost was not a worst case senario (like over 300k jobs lost). We sold off sharply the last two days EXPECTING a bad number to be released today and we got one. The economy lost 240k jobs in Oct, the Sept number was revised up to 284k from 159k, and the Oct unemployment rate moved up to 6.5% (highest since March 1994!). Yikes. So why in the world did we rally 250 pts in the face of this nasty news? I heard of someone still yacking today about how the Obama caused the selloff the last two days. Unreal how people think markets work. This is simply not the case because "the market"--which is simply a collection of all aggregate supply/demand and its behavior that it produces--prices in future expectations way before the Average Joe even thinks of them.

Anyway, it was a productive day overall I would have to say on the major averages. I was expecting at the least a small bounce off the 900 level from yesterday and we actually ripped into the close to finish the day at the highs, roughly 930 on the SPX. Not a bad way to go into a weekend. Honestly cant remember we finished a Friday at the highs of the day. That being said I would not be surprised to see a continuation into early next week, but will go into detail on that more Sunday night.

Barack Obama gave his first public press conference since the election today, during market hours, and actually the markets rallied afterward. Maybe this is a new trend we can look forward to, lol, instead of looking for selling every time Bush and Bernanke come on tv to speak. I gotta say, regardless of your political preference, Mr. Obama does seem to inspire confidence in people and thus the markets when he talks. Even myself I feel encouraged to see this new sort of energy in the air that he has created. It is pretty neat and something we have not seen out of DC in a while. No matter if youre black, white, blue or purple you are firstly an American and we together all are trying to accomplish reasonably similar objectives, just with different paths of getting there. That being said he is our new leader come January 20th, like it or not, and we should be open-minded and support his plans as they are put into action.

Don't want to get too political here but wanted to share what was on my mind. So have a great weekend and we will see what the markets do next week but remember the waiting is part of the game :)