So today was good news on the employment front. This morning (oh so very early morning) I posted [what impacts the jobs report would have on my portfolion http://jjayson.dailykos.com/story/2004/5/7/554/64679] just to give people a look at my twisted investment thought process. I got a little lucky and did well (post mortem inside).
First, the good news about jobs. I haven't really heard much negative from people today, except for the odd person that was looking for another 300,000-plus payroll additions and saw it as a necessity of job creation proof (I was looking for a hair above 300,000 too, but I would have accepted anything above 250,000). We did get 288,000 and an upward revision of March to 337,000. (I guess the 29,000 revision plus this month's gain gives us 317,000 from the report, so I can be happy with that.) Besides that, long-term unemployment was down too.
And this is one of very few months recently where the household survey and payroll survey are in line with each other. The household survey showed an employment increase of 278,000 (last month when the payroll shows a 308,000 increase and the household actually showed a 3,000 drop). And once again unemployment and labor force participation would be showing ever better numbers if 16-19 year-olds were ignored.
Jobs
One of the best pieces of news is only 8,000 government jobs (Bush has been piling up the government jobs). The first manufacturing employment increase in years at 21,000 (a good number too, not like two or three thousand). And the 123,000 in business and professional services are great too.
Those not in the labor force but want a job even ticked down on a nominal basis too. The number working part-time for economic reasons even fell. Good news all around.
It is so hard to find something bad in the report that the level of detail required would be enough to find the coal lining on any report.
Port Mortem: How I did today
Overall, I did pretty well.
Bonds took a good beating today on the strength of the report. The 10-Year dropped (the stick for today is hidden down in the volume bars at the bottom right), and the iShare 20-plus year bond fund (TLT) dropped and continues to drop after hours. However, this look to be running out of steam to the down side. The futures market give bonds another few percent, but the best ride seems to be behind us, at least for a while. There is just such an expectation of a Fed increase that there is nothing left to trade on. I won't close out any of my bond ETF or futures contracts, but that is because I don't trust the Nasdaq to really perform very well until somebody pulls away in the election race, and at least I can pull something in from the the rest of the slide.
The dollar soared causing gold to fall under $380. Since the beginning of April gold has fallen over $50 an ounce. That's a 14% run up in the dollar in a little over a month. I think the dollar fall might be done with. That's good.
I am surprised that the iShares Goldman Sachs Tech Index (IGM) didn't fall further. It was essentially even on a day most other tech indexes were down.