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“I’m totally used to deflation. Deflation is finished.”  – Richard Fisher

Does somebody want to tell the market that the calendar says September?  After the strongest first-day of September for the S&P 500 since 2010, global equities are in rally mode again today with Europe up nearly 2% and S&P 500 futures trading higher by over half of a percent.

ADP Employment for August just came out, and the headline reading missed expectations by a mile (428K vs 1,000K). While that’s a big miss, we would note that last month’s report was an even bigger miss relative to expectations (1,67K vs 1,200K), and even after that big miss, the NFP report two days later exceeded expectations by nearly 300K (1,763K vs 1,480K).

Be sure to check out today’s Morning Lineup for a rundown of the latest stock-specific news of note, market performance in the US and Europe, trends related to the COVID-19 outbreak, and much more.

With a rally of 0.75% yesterday, the S&P 500 kicked off the month with its best start to a September since 2010.  Gains of this magnitude are not particularly common for the start of September.  Since 1928, yesterday was just the 23rd time that the S&P 500 kicked off September with a gain of more than 0.50%.  The table below highlights each of those occurrences along with the performance of the S&P 500 for the remainder of the month.  In the 22 prior occurrences, the S&P 500 saw a median gain of 1.27% for the remainder of the month with positive returns 59% of the time.  That may not sound like all that big of an advance, but for all months of September, the median performance from the close on the first trading day of the month has been a decline of 0.10% with gains slightly less than half of the time.