With crude oil trading near $61, the U.S. dollar lower and gold and silver higher, today a legend in the business sent King World News a powerful piece discussing what you need to know ahead of Friday's important jobs release and today's Cinco de Mayo.
From Art Cashin's notes: An Interesting Theory That We'll Look To On Friday – In the past, we have noted that in our opinion, Nicholas Colas, the Chief Market Strategist over at Convergex is one of the most consistently "outside the box" thinkers on Wall Street. As an example, here is the opening of a piece he put out overnight:
Summary: Everyone’s trying their best to get an edge on Friday’s Jobs Report, and one tool many use is the Individual Tax and Withholding data from the U.S. Treasury. By that measure, things should be pretty rosy. April personal tax/withholding is up 6.2% from last year, and 10.2% when you include individual taxes not withheld. Both those numbers show a nice acceleration from the 5-7% pace of the last six months.
So we should get a barn burner April employment, right? Not so fast. Fully 80% of the growth in U.S. employment over the last year comes from college-educated workers, even though they are only 38% of the +25 year old workforce. With that growth comes some select wage inflation and therefore higher individual tax/withholding receipts, fully explaining the good Treasury data. The bad news: the unemployment rate for college educated workers is down to 2.5%, and if just 400,000 more BA/BS-holders get jobs, it will drop to its pre-crisis level of 1.8%. That scarcity could well be why job growth slowed last month and will remain on a permanently lower glide path in 2015.
As you can see, Nick contends that a large part of the payroll growth we've seen is from the pool of college-educated workers and that target pool is shrinking rapidly. We'll watch Friday's numbers with a bit more interest.
Cinco De Mayo – Today will see all kinds of celebrations, music, dancing and dining all in celebration of Mexico and Mexican culture. The celebrations will occur all around the United States and in places as far away as Tokyo and Paris.
The odd part is that it is not heavily celebrated in Mexico – at least not yet.
Cinco de Mayo commemorates the Mexican victory at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. In that battle, the Mexicans managed to hold off and ultimately defeat a French force nearly twice its size.
The victory was a morale builder but not a turning point as the French went on to conquer Mexico City a year later and install a French Emperor.
The holiday has been celebrated by Mexican-Americans ever since the First Anniversary of the battle. By 1900, celebration began to spread from California to other pockets in the U.S. In the 1980's, the celebrations kicked into high gear as several brewers saw its promotional possibilities. Hey, we'll take solidarity and national pride, however it comes.
While I don't usually celebrate Cinco de Mayo personally, the mere mention of the holiday always brings a smile to my face as I recall the time, ten years ago; when one of the dimmer bulbs on the floor burst into a crowd to loudly ask: "Hey! When is this Cinco de Mayo, anyway?"
Consensus – Pre-opening, things seem to be reversing a bit. Bio-tech and social tech look weak and there's renewed Greek chatter. Evans says hold off to 2016. Bulls need to push through S&P 2126 and Dow 18176. Bears may try to steal the momentum. Stay wary, alert and very, very nimble. ***ALSO JUST RELEASED: Richard Russell – Did The U.S. Treasury Just Issue A Major Warning? And What About Gold, Silver And Costco? CLICK HERE.
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