strawberry fields

market vibes

February 11…)

130,000 jobs created in January

The lowest forecast going into this morning’s BLS jobs report was a negative -10,000 loss. Yesterday media pundits uniformly guided expectations lower than a consensus 70,000. Fwiw…Last September BLS’ annual job revisions added to 2024 job revisions totaled nearly 2 million fewer jobs than its monthly reports during the period.

According to the BLS, 82,000 heathcare workers (50,000 in ambulatory services and 18,000 in hospitals/nursing and residential care) got a job, and about 42,000 unemployed found work in social services, primarily individual and family services. Thirty thousand construction workers are building AI data centers. The report stated exactly zero job growth in manufacturing in January, as in 0 … otherwise said, none, nil… month-over-month new jobs in the entire US manufacturing economy which is 240,000 companies employing around 13 million people.

Note* The comments and charts may not be precisely aligned this morning. I started writing this at 8:30 and at 8:45 Substack went down for 90 minutes. In the meantime the S&P fell 50 handles because …according to the talking heads… the BLS report implies the economy is so strong there will not be any rate cuts “for some considerable time.” Bonds fell hard and metals receded.

in the markets

There was a gnarly bearish divergence in NDX hourly data. Which slammed into buying on the lows. If I had to guess, the object of the algo is vol control not a bull rip. Definitely not a hard sell off.

NDX hourly data

However, one of these days…In daily data there’s an awful lot of red in this chart. OI is going nowhere and volumes are literally vapors. Record high margin debt and this is what it bought.

NDX daily data

The Dow is still holding 50,000.

March DOW futures

Gold and silver are in a completely different dimension of risk. The plunge has stabilized, open interest is flat but stable and whatever flows are coming and going are very low volume. I still see more deceleration and a developing range.

April gold daily data

Silver is similar but different… the little 3-day range is atop last Friday’s reversal instead of a hefty few days of rejection in gold. Open interest continues to liquidate in silver albeit on very light volume but the sense I get from the charts is money moving out of silver into gold. Overall same idea: stable deceleration.

March silver

Bonds had a minor dip caught between the Census Bureau’s retail sales and the BLS NFP. All of these data are really just algo food that gets chewed and digested in the belly of the markets. I don’t think bonds are going down so that solves half of my problem.

March long bond

We might have a down wiggle in WTI depending on the close. I will update tonight. Technicals are flat… volume is low and open interest is high. Sentiment is one-sidedly bullish, IMO. As expected (by me) a big DOE build in crude. The news says there might be trouble in Iran.

I have no clue what is happening in the Bitcoin universe but my take on BTC futures is the market is slightly short and getting shorter.

If Feb BTC takes out $60k the next identifiable level of support is $49k in rather stale continuous data.

my vibe

I’ll spare you any more spitballing this morning. LOL… stocks just went up on the day… I’ll have a better or more confident view this evening. The producers of today’s “no cut” narrative got what they wanted. Green light to go higher now… might be a strong close in stocks.

It’s only Wednesday and it feels like Friday.

Hodl and wait.

the zombies!!

happy wednesday!

JJ

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Charts and data CQG and Bloomberg… occasional cartoons by Gary Larson

Market vibes is not a registered investment advisor. Comments, thoughts and opinions are entirely those of the author without any representations to accuracy and are for informational use only. Any mention of a particular security, index, derivative, or other instrument is NOT a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold that security, index, derivative, or any other related instrument.