Don’t miss my upcoming appearances:

The Dallas Money Show October 13-14

and the New Orleans Investment Conference, Nov. 1-4

The Weakest First Two Days of Any Quarter Since 2008

Before I get into what happened with today's nonfarm payroll number and the 372.68 rally in the Dow that it helped spark, I want to back and talk about what happened on Wednesday and Thursday, which were the 2 days following my Tuesday podcast, from the first day of the 4th quarter of the year. On Wednesday, the market sold off sharply, in fact at one point we were down better than 600 points on the day. We managed to close down just under 500 - 494 points.  At that point, the first 2 days of the 4th quarter of 2019 were the weakest first 2 days of any quarter - not just a 4th quarter - but of any quarter going all the way back to 2008, which was the year the market imploded because of the '08 financial crisis.

Weakness in Private Sector Jobs

One of the data points that came out on Wednesday that may have been a contributing factor - but probably not - was the ADP employment number, which is an early look at the official numbers that came out today.  This is just the private sector, which is certainly weaker than the government sector, and I'm going to get into that when I discuss today's numbers later in the podcast. But, the estimate was for 152,000 jobs created in the private sector and we only got 135,000.  But, not only that, there was a downward revision to the prior month, from 195,000 to 157,000.  So, this was additional evidence of economic weakness that was weighing on the market.

IPO's Cancelled Due to Insufficient Investor Demand

Also, again we had the follow over from what I had pointed out on my podcast not only on Tuesday, but on Friday the prior week regarding the weakness in the newly publicly traded companies - money losing companies - the fact that some of these companies had to cancel their IPO's due to insufficient investor demand. All of that was weighing on the market and helped produce that sharp decline.

ISM Non-Manufacturing Down A Lot - Not Just a Little Bit

And when we got into the market on Thursday, the market had opened initially a little bit higher.  But then as soon as we got the ISM non-manufacturing number (remember, we had gotten a very weak manufacturing number and was part of the reason we had the big decline earlier in the weak) but now we got the ISM non-manufacturing number and this number was forecast to come in at 55.5.  This would have been a reduction in the 56.4 that we had for August.  But instead of going down a little bit, the number went down a lot - all the way down to 52.6.