The US jobs report, which came out on Friday surprised the market because no one was expecting the US NFP to come in that strong. The US economy created over 916K jobs when the forecast was for 652K. The unemployment rate also fell further to 6.0% from its previous reading of 6.2%. The only softness in the economic numbers were in the Average Hourly Earnings m/m, which fell to -0.1% from its previous reading of 0.2%. Overall, there was no doubt that the US futures reacted positively to the US jobs numbers.
Today, most of the markets are closed again for a bank holiday, so we aren’t going to see the full reaction of the strong US economic number on the other markets. In fact, it is highly likely that we will see the volume in the US economy on the low side as well, as many traders may like to avoid participation in a market which doesn’t have much volume.
Overall, this week is expected to be fairly quiet as there isn’t much on the economic docket and in terms of Fed speakers, not many of them are slated to speak this week. Also, this is the last week, before we begin to see new quarter’s earnings. The expectations are that next quarter’s earnings will be full of optimism and we will hear a lot of favourable comments from companies. This could lead to upward revision of their forecasts. In addition to this, investors will be looking for signs as to whether consumers are ready to go on their summer holidays as a large portion are getting their vaccine shots.
In simple words, in this short holiday week, expect little action in the market but the market is going to be highly volatile next week when we begin to see the earnings reports.
It is essential to keep in mind that the month of April from a seasonality perspective is a good month for the stock market.
In the commodity trading space, we have the gold price back above the 1,700 dollar price level. The price is still struggling to move above the 50, 100 and 200-day simple moving averages on the daily time frame. As long as the price continues to fail to break above the 50-day SMA on the daily time frame, the likely chances are that gold price will continue to move lower and we will not see any bullish price trend.
In the cryptocurrencies trading space, Bitcoin is struggling to move above the 60K price level. This resistance level is keeping the Bitcoin in check. On the fundamental side, there is no doubt that there is no shortage of positive news as pretty much every day we are hearing some new good news. It is alarming that all this news has not able to push the Bitcoin price to its new all-time high though.
Another crypto coin which is also gathering a lot of momentum is Ripple’s XRP. All eyes are on the ongoing battle with the SEC and XRP’s management team. If XRP team is able to win the case against the SEC, then we could see some serious price moves.