A choppy week for stock prices that revolved around investor reaction to employment reports. In the end, a net down week for prices although a Friday rally lessened the declines.
Downward movement really took off on Thursday when a popular private employment report suggested massive employment gains in May. This led investors to conclude the Fed would react to this information with many more significant interest rate increases this year – causing a huge recession – so widespread selling of stocks commenced.
However, Friday’s official employment report was much more modest, suggesting only reasonable employment gains that would not be that inflationary. So, investors got right back into stocks at reduced prices from Thursday’s sell-off. This caused stocks to recover some of their Thursday decline, but not fully.
Most of our stocks were decliners on the week, for another “giveback” week. But as we’ve seen previously, institutions were not among the panic sellers for the week, so there are few trades for us this weekend.
We seem to have returned, at least temporarily, to the choppy, trendless up-down-up-down weeks seen in the first quarter of the year. Make for very unproductive trading.
All employment reports are suspect when it comes to accuracy, so remains to be seen what the actual activity is – we just know investors are very tuned in and may react dramatically when numbers suggest big gains or losses. This is bound to keep the otherwise dull summer stock trading months interesting.
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