Before the Open (Jan 4)

Good morning. Happy Friday. Happy Employment Numbers Day.
The Asian/Pacific markets closed mixed. Japan rallied big (2.8%). China and Indonesia also moved up. Australia, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan moved down. Europe is currently mixed. Austria, Belgium and the Czech Republic are posting the biggest losses; Greece is up the most. Twenty minutes before the jobs report was released, futures here in the States were flat.

The dollar is up. Oil and copper are down. Gold and silver are down a bunch.
I talked about this yesterday. Based on the FOMC minutes, the market is back to a catch-22. Some members of the FOMC want to stay the course and continue with QE until 2015; others want to halt or cut quantitative easing programs before the end of 2013. This spooked Wall St., and it should because the market is addicted to low rates and constant injections of money every month. If good numbers come out, QE could be turned off sooner than later. If bad numbers are released, QE is likely to keep going. Herein lies the catch-22. If you want QE to continue, you root for bad news. Crazy world we live in…or maybe just a crazy country.
Here are the employment numbers…
unemployment rate: 7.8% (same as last month)
nonfarm payrolls: 155K added (155K was expected)
private payrolls: I’ll post when I see them.
average workweek: 34.5 hours (was 34.4 last month)
hourly earnings: $23.73 (up 7 cents)
The November nonfarm payrolls number was revised up; October was revised down.
Electronically traded futures didn’t change much after the numbers were released.
The Santa Claus indicator, which uses the last 5 days of one year and the first 2 of the next to predict the following year’s price movement, closed yesterday with a decent gain over those 7 days.
Now we look for the January indicator for further hints of 2013.
Earnings season is around the corner.
As of right now, the price action is good, but there are warnings beneath the surface. I’m long, but I see very few new set ups worth playing. The market needs to either correct or rest to allow the charts to reset again. More after the open.
headlines at Yahoo Finance
headlines at MarketWatch
today’s upgrades/downgrades
this week’s Earnings
this week’s Economic Numbers