It seems with enough whining and miles logged by CEOs driving en route to hearings in hybrid vehicles, House Democrats and the White House were able to reach some consensus on providing aid to the Beg 3.
Nancy Pelosi finally backed off sourcing funding from the $700B bailout, already earmarked for…”improvisational measures” by the Treasury under the adept management of Impresario Kashkari. A compromise followed to pull the funding from the Department of Energy’s $25B loan geared toward increasing fuel efficiency (somehow that ended up designated as the appropriate funding source), with 17 bills (or 1/2 the original revised amount requested) is under consideration to hand out.
Apparently yesterday’s NFP number was the impetus for the new-found resolution. But really, what’s another 250k jobs lost?
So $17B is going to these companies to maintain them on life support until more formal concessions, planning, oversight (Schumer’s “car czar”, for instance), and longer-term sources of funding can be worked out. Is this really “a good beginning”? With all that has preceded this, I can’t help but remain incredulous.
Typo? No; everyone’s out of work apparently, and the bread lines are queueing up. A prodigious mass of once proud and industrious workers are now shriveled proletariat-please-drop-a-coin-in-my-hat husks resigned to selling fruit, flowers and firewood filched from national parklands from the side of the road. I can make some sense of that, however; once private lands are collectivized with the abolition of private property, that firewood could be taken rightfully. But then there’d be no need to sell it. Whatever.
NFP posted -533k today, which duped even the more pessimistic estimates preceding the release of -400k, while analyst consensus averaged a relatively rosy -325k. September and October were both given significant revisions, pegging total job destruction at ~2M for the year. Some of the BLS’s numbers seem fudged a bit, but I’m not one to get up-in-arms over it (for some background look here). Unemployment ticked up to 6.7% from 6.5%.
The symmetrical triangle mentioned last night benefited from the news, at least. Here it is on a 3H chart:
Speaking of that TF, how’s the previous-mentioned swing method performing that I’m forward-testing? My latest mock trade was entered just below 141 on Monday (vertical red line) after the MACD Histogram reached -.5:
A little over 600 pips, then and still running. MACD again has positive divergence, however, even if the histogram seems asleep at the wheel….
Well, the market has the usual NFP-induced first-Friday psychosis, I’ve got a vacation day, so I’m going to do something else.
Damn but that’s a horrible video. No matter. Two albums now with one just released, both excellent.
Or maybe some Underoath?
Who’s that gnarled Lilliputian cyclops character walking off with that little cube, anyway? This video is Pan’s Labyrinth meets The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (if only for the cyclops):
Was that a defective fire engine siren used for the Cyclops, or maybe produced by feeding a curtain into a vacuum cleaner?
Whatever I do, I better do it. All I can get away with after my wife comes home is something like Charlie Parker.
Which I don’t mind at all.
Trades: Just covered a post-NFP short on the Guppy to flatten things out ahead of the weekend.
Flattened the last half of my most recently held GBP/JPY trade at 135.64 this evening for an even 500 pips. This after garnering 578 pips earlier in the day on the first half.
I did have a buy limit on some QID set for 73.65 today, which missed by $0.35. Ah well.
Down further? The pair looks capable of making it back to mid-136’s before turning down again. There’s no certainty to speak of, but yet another symmetrical triangle (a constant overture around here) gives a good clue.
NFP coming up in a few hours, so price could and may simply wander out of this construction in a sideways fashion; but, unless there’s an extremely positive print (and I think MoM it will only become worse), the directional bias will remains valid.
I know it: this is the first you’ve heard that NFP is this morning, and a bit disconcerted because you missed that point amidst the arcane I-told-you-idiots-this-would-occur-35-years-ago blather emitting from the latest elliott wave newsletter in your inbox and you’re now ill-equipped to straddle the EUR/USD for a quick scalp. Dammit, I know it; I know it.
All that’s left to do then is take the family to IHOP for a 2000 calorie (each – you are American, after all) breakfast this morning. That’ll keep you in a suitably catatonic, occasionally gurgling state (nothing to be done about the gurgles, I’m afraid) and help you end that Friday afternoon losing streak by staying of the market today, where you belong.
So, any downside surprises on tap this morning? Squawking heads on financial news channels are kind of the media cognate for the odd-lot set; but I think we’re in for a dismal release.
0830 ET: 6.5%, -240k. I wonder if CNBC has frozen hiring yet….
