Private sector jobs rose by 90,000 in September. Better than expected, they say. Expected by whom? A room full of economists who've been wrong eleven months in a row? The same people who predicted a recession in 2022, then 2023, then 2024, and are now penciling in 2027 just to hedge their bets?
ADP releases this report every month. It gets revised the next month. The revision gets ignored because everyone's already trading on the new number. Which will also be revised. It's a perfect system if your goal is to create maximum noise with zero accountability.
Here's what happened: some algorithm at ADP crunched payroll data from their clients and spit out 90,000. Analysts expected less. Markets rallied for eleven minutes. Then someone remembered the actual jobs report comes out Friday and none of this matters.
But retail traders saw "better than expected" and bought calls. They always do. They see green and think opportunity. They see a headline with a number in it and assume it means something. These are the same people who bought Chinese EV stocks because a guy on Reddit said the charts looked bullish.
The jobs market picked up after a brief slowdown. Brief slowdown. That's what we're calling it now. Not a trend. Not a warning sign. A brief slowdown. Like when your heart stops briefly during surgery.
September added 90,000 jobs. August will be revised down by 40,000 in three weeks. No one will write a headline about that. There's no drama in subtraction. No one clicks on "We Were Wrong, Here's The Real Number." They click on "Better Than Expected" because it sounds like winning.
ADP will release another report next month. It'll be better or worse than expected. Economists will nod thoughtfully. Traders will trade. And precisely none of it will tell you where to put your money, because payroll data is astrology for people who own calculators.
Photo by on Unsplash
Leave a Comment