The U.S. economy added 57,000 jobs in June. Economists expected 115,000. That's a miss of 58,000 jobs, which in technical analysis terms translates to absolutely f*cking nothing because employment data gets revised more often than a high school sophomore's college essay.
Unemployment ticked down to 4.2% from 4.3%. So fewer jobs were created than expected, but fewer people are unemployed. Makes perfect sense. This is the same mathematical elegance that convinced day traders Tesla would hit $500 by last Tuesday because some guy on Twitter posted a triangle.
Retail traders are now panic-searching "what does NFP mean" and "is 57k good or bad" and "why is my portfolio down if unemployment went down." They will find fourteen contradictory YouTube videos. They will watch all of them. They will understand none of them. They will buy calls anyway.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics will revise this number twice. Once in July. Once in August. By September, June's payroll figure could be 12,000 or 190,000, and everyone will pretend they knew it all along. The unemployment rate will get adjusted by a tenth of a point in some footnote nobody reads. Technical analysts will draw new lines on charts to accommodate the new data, which is like rewriting history except sadder because at least historians admit what they're doing.
Here's what actually matters: nothing changed. The labor market is the labor market. Your moving averages didn't see this coming. Your Fibonacci retracements didn't predict it. That guy who called the last three corrections also called the previous seventy that didn't happen.
But sure, redraw your support levels because the economy added 0.034% fewer jobs than some economist's wild guess.
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