It’s like attending a bingo session. All eyes will be down waiting for the highly anticipated employment print this morning. Will this week’s ADP report translate into a much weaker jobs number? Will the stubbornly elevated weekly claims push the unemployment rate up two ticks? Will analyst’s consensus of a headline loss of -100k jobs and no growth in the private sector provide us with a non-event as we head into the ‘labor’ weekend? Expect liquidity to be thin as many New Yorkers skip out of town averting the storm ahead of the holiday. It’s another crap-shoot.

Call a spade a spade, my forecast was wrong. Economic conditions are continuing to deteriorate, but the market did not decline on the news. For weeks, I have been getting short and the entry price on those puts was good. The positions were making decent money, but I felt the best had yet to come. Yesterday’s rally stripped away those profits, but at least my losses were contained. I was confident in my forecast and my positions were large. China's PMI did not drop below 50, but it did come in below expectations at 51.7 (52 was the consensus estimate).

Not much has changed since my last post. The gold market is still over-extended in my opinion, although there are fundamentals that will probably support this market for a very long time. The stock market is still swinging wildly from day to day based on whatever traders think the news is meaning at the moment. And bonds continue to stay at high levels when many analysts think this market has no business being where it is.

Are prominent stock market bloggers in aggregate able to predict the market’s direction? The Ticker Sense Blogger Sentiment Poll “is a survey of the web’s most prominent investment bloggers, asking ‘What is your outlook on the U.S. stock market for the next 30 days?’” (bullish, bearish or neutral) on a weekly basis. The site currently lists 16 active prognosticators. Participation has varied over time.

The market has been both lower and higher already in early trading, as a few economic releases swayed early trading. The CaseShiller Home Price Index for June rose to 148.0 from 146.5. That was a slight improvement, but most of the housing slowdown that has been talked about began in July, so this report will likely be taken with a grain of salt until we see how July fared.