Waiting on NFP - By Larry Levin

The market was quite lame today following up yesterday's "rally time" trade. I guess it took a breather as traders wait of the NFP (Non-Farm Payroll) report. Although today's total range was 14.00 points, there were multiple long periods of time when the ES traded within a pedestrian 2.50 or 3.50 point range. Bah! That was awful.

Additionally, the volume was thin and once again lower than normal. There was one point in the day when the mini-ES quickly reversed off of 1093.00...but it was silent in the pit (this = very slender). It was so thin in the pit that by the time a trade was made in the big S&P, which was playing catch up with the ES, the "bigs" had moved 2.00 full POINTS. Can you imagine being short at 1093.00 and your first opportunity to cover is 1095.00, which is $500 per car...and you were short 10? YIKES! That's so thin it makes Olive Oyl look fat.

The following is a portion by Nic Lenoir of ICAP via zerohedge. The full piece can be found here http://www.zerohedge.com/article/dead-cat-bounce-progress-key-resistance-reached

"All eyes are on the NFP number coming out tomorrow. I personally believe that the number will match or beat expectations. HOWEVER the jury it out regarding the relevance of a number propped up by a birth-death model and census hiring. This week Citi Financial announced it was closing multiple branches and HP is going to reorganize 6,000 jobs and terminate an additional 3,000. Jobless claims are also not really painting that cheerful a picture, and neither did ADP earlier today. That's right even HP is still not done cutting jobs even though the stock is still up almost 100% from last March's lows and I am sure analysts are trampling each other to upgrade the price target. My macro view is that the global economy is imbalanced and too many jobs in the US are services which only thrive when the stock market is booming and the wealthy spends lavishly (do you seriously need a massage and a beer brought by someone you tip $20 every time you get a haircut?). Since we no longer have the possibility to run our economy on credit, we have reached the tipping point where we need real jobs to support growth otherwise without a strong middle class spending will drop and to make matters worse people will rely on asset sales to support whatever spending they still engage in as the political capital to use federal funds to maintain the economy afloat vanishes."

Behold the age of infinite moral hazard! Today is the 427th day of legalized accounting fraud on a grand scale. April 2nd, 2009 was the day CONgress forced FASB to suspend rule 157 in favor of deceitful accounting.

Trade well and follow the trend, not the so-called “experts.”