Friday, April 6, 2012

"Stock Futures Plunge Following Weak Jobs Report"

With the equities markets closed for the Holiday the only way to trade the jobs report was a 45-minute window on the futures market. The S&P was trading up a couple points when the report hit, quite a reversal.
DJIA futures down 131, S&P down 15.30 to 1374.90.
From Bloomberg:
U.S. stock futures fell, signaling more Standard & Poor’s 500 Index losses following the biggest weekly retreat of the year, after American employers added fewer jobs than forecast in March.

S&P 500 (SPX) futures expiring in June slumped 1.1 percent to 1,374.90 at 9:15 a.m. New York time following the benchmark index’s 0.7 percent weekly loss. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures retreated 131 points, or 1 percent, to 12,847 today. U.S. stock exchanges were shut for the Good Friday holiday.

Equities slumped this week after the Federal Reserve signaled it will refrain from further monetary stimulus and concern about Europe intensified. The U.S. Labor Department said today that employers added 120,000 jobs, the fewest in five months and less than the median economist forecast of 205,000 in a Bloomberg survey. The amount had exceeded 200,000 for three straight months.

“This is a real shock,” Donald Selkin, the New York-based chief market strategist at National Securities Corp., which manages about $3 billion, said in a telephone interview. “Everybody is so hung up on the 200,000 increase.”
Equity traders had 45 minutes to react to the jobs report today in the U.S. Futures linked to the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average stopped at 9:15 a.m. New York time on CME Group Inc.’s Chicago Mercantile Exchange....MORE