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“Maintain a firm grasp of the obvious at all times.” – Jeff Bezos

Morning stock market summary

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Work on the day after July 4th? Life just isn’t fair is it? While many of us out here would prefer to use July 5th as a day to extend the July 4th holiday out an extra day, or even rest off a July 4th barbeque hangover, that wasn’t Jeff Bezos in 1994.  Instead of going to the beach or taking an extra day, on this day thirty years ago Bezos started Abracadabra, which ultimately became known as Amazon.com (AMZN). In less than 30 years, this company has become one of the most valuable in the world. Thirty years to become the fifth largest company in the United States may sound impressive, but of the four that are larger, Microsoft (MSFT) and Apple (AAPL) are older after being founded in the mid-1970s, but NVIDIA (NVDA) is only a year older, and Alphabet (GOOGL) is four years younger.

Futures were little changed heading into the Non-Farm Payrolls report, as you would expect given the quasi-holiday, and the same went for Treasuries and crude oil.  The market area seeing the most volatility this morning is in the crypto space where the release of assets tied to the Mt. Gox bankruptcy has raised fears of a wave short-term supply hitting the market.

The Non-Farm Payrolls report was just released, and just like last month, the headline reading came in stronger than expected while the Unemployment report was higher than forecast at 4.1%, the highest level since November 2021. Add to that, May’s originally reported number of an increase of 272K payrolls was revised down to 218K, so the blistering pace of the employment sector from a year ago no longer remains the case. As you might expect, treasuries caught a bid on the news and the 10-year yield is down 5 bps to 4.30%.

On the political front, major media outlets like Bloomberg are calling it a “Make-or-Break” weekend for the President saying that “most crucial for Biden will be an interview on Friday with ABC News, offering voters and allies the first unscripted, high-pressure look at the president since he faltered in his showdown with former President Donald Trump.”  Whatever your politics, can we all agree that in this country’s nearly 250-year history, the bar for a “Make-or-Break” moment in a President’s administration has never been much lower than a taped interview?

If a monthly employment report drops on the Friday after July 4th when most people took the day off, does it count?  That depends on the report. Today, we’ll get another answer as it will be just the fourth time in the last 25+ years that an employment report was released on the Friday after July 4th.  In the chart below, we show the S&P 500’s intraday performance on the day of each of those prior three days, and based on that small sample size, you may want to be on the lookout for some volatility – at least more than a sub-13 reading in the VIX would suggest.  In two of the three days, the S&P 500 was up at least 1%, while on the third and most recent occurrence (7/5/19), stocks fell 0.20%.  Given the 1%+ daily moves on two of the three days, you would think that the reports deviated from expectations by a wide margin, but in 2002, the headline reading in Non-Farm Payrolls (NFP) was just 45K weaker than expected while in 2013, it came in 29K higher.  Ironically, it was the 2019 report, when NFP deviated the most from expectations (+65K), that the S&P 500 had its smallest move. And what’s the deal with the shortened session in 2002, and who decided it was a good idea to make today a full trading day since then? Based on where futures are trading now, the S&P 500 looks to be following the low-volatility path of 2019, but there’s still a full session of trading left to go. Thanks, NYSE!