The widely anticipated jobs report came out just now, and job growth was much weaker than expected, plus past growth was revised lower. This is the first miss in the jobs report in months, and in a long of a third of a billion people, adding fifty-seven thousand jobs is pretty lame.
Lame as it was, that’s precisely what the bulls wanted to see, so futures rocketed higher. Well, maybe rocketed isn’t quite the right word. As I’m typing these words, half an hour after the jobs release, the gains have largely faded and looking at the past week of the /ES, you can see that the huge spike from the report accomplished nothing more than creating a lower high.
The /NQ surged as well, but it only recaptured a minority of its tumble yesterday.
The /RTY has been very interesting in recent weeks, because it keeps playing jump rope with its trendline. Yesterday, in a very unusual move on my part, I did a crazy trade of buying IWM puts that expired the next day (that is, today). They were $301 strike puts, and I bought them at the arrow mark. A couple of hours later, I sold them for a 70%+ profit, but I was kicking myself at day’s end when the same options had moved up about 120%. Let’s just say I’m not kicking myself at all now for holding on to the things.
As i wrap up this post, the futures are all still green, but the air is still coming out of the tires. I’m coming into the day rather aggressively, but at least I don’t have those Thursday expiration puts!
