Navel-gazing pre-occupied Wall Street on Friday as investors lifted the Dow Industrials 75 points on word of stronger than “expected” payroll growth in February. Seemingly overlooked by the revelers was that unemployment also rose slightly, to 4.8 percent. This might seem like a curious discrepancy, but who’s quibbling? Everyone but CNBC’s anchors and a few over-the-hill pundits are in on the joke – that the numbers are derived from a monthly reading of  platypus entrails – so why would we at Rick’s Picks be so churlish as to denigrate the patriotic efforts of our good friends at the Labor Department? In fact, appreciating the value of dependably “good” numbers as much as the next guy, we applaud Labor’s apparent success in developing a statistical formula that has allowed unemployment to remain – to paraphrase the immortal Prof. Irving Fischer – on a permanently low plateau.

From a technical perspective, stocks looked poised to move higher on Monday. If so, take heart, all you die-hard bears, since shares would be an even juicier short than they were on Friday. One particularly bullish sign was that the broad averages regained traction following the obligatory Friday afternoon sell-off; moreover, they ended the session with an in-your-face short-squeeze, presumably to give bears something to think about over the weekend. The skeptics undoubtedly will give buyers wide berth come Monday morning, assuming there are no mushroom clouds on the horizon to dim the invincible ardor of investors. Lest we face this stampede unarmed and defenseless, let me proffer an extravagant rally target for the Dow Industrials -- just in case optimism runs amok over the next few days: 11232, give or take the usual tick or two.