Fade the Non-Farm-Payroll Lunatics

Although stocks spent most of the week churning, nothing seems to be able to bring them down for more than a day or two. Unemployment and non-farm payrolls numbers will be released Friday morning, and although economists and Wall Street pretend to care about this fundamentally meaningless data, it’s hard to imagine the broad averages going on a tear if the NFP figure released is within 25,000 either way of the 175,000 new jobs expected. If I’m wrong and hysteria breaks out, as it often does on Wall Street for no good reason, fade the initial move, especially if it’s up.