Nonfarm payrolls expected to rise by 83,000. Unemployment holding steady at 4.2%. Both numbers will be revised twice in the next sixty days and nobody will remember what the original forecast was.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics will release these figures Friday morning. Traders will panic or celebrate for ninety seconds. Algorithms will execute seventeen thousand trades before a human finishes reading the headline. By noon the market will have moved on to something else entirely.
Eighty-three thousand jobs. That's the expert consensus. Not 82,000. Not 85,000. Exactly 83,000, as if economists possess a level of precision that has eluded them during every recession, bubble, and flash crash in recorded history.
Your cousin who bought NVDA calls based on a Reddit comment thread has the same chance of being right about Friday's number as the PhD who spent forty hours building an econometric model. Difference is your cousin will lose less money because he can't afford to lose more.
The unemployment rate stays at 4.2%. Unchanged. Perfectly flat. The economy apparently decided to take a month off from doing anything interesting. Hiring managers across America coordinated to deliver the exact number of jobs needed to keep the rate frozen in place.
Retail traders are already positioned for this announcement. Half of them long. Half of them short. All of them equally confident. All of them referencing charts that show completely different things depending on whether you're looking at the 15-minute or the 4-hour timeframe.
Friday morning will bring a number. That number will be declared good or bad based on whether it matches a different number that was itself a guess. Then both numbers will be forgotten by Monday when everyone starts guessing about next month.
The technicals haven't changed since Tuesday and they won't change after Friday unless price actually moves, which it may or may not do regardless of whether 83,000 people got jobs.
Photo by Glen Carrie on Unsplash
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