Weekly Recap - Week ending 07-Oct-11

Failure to sustain a rebound from midday losses left stocks to roll into the red during the final hour. They still made it out with week 2% higher than where they started.

The major equity averages lacked direction this morning, even though premarket participants had cheered the September jobs report. Nonfarm payrolls grew by 103,000, up from an upwardly revised 57,000 in August. However, the upside surprise is mostly due to the end of a strike at Verizon. Excluding those workers, payrolls increased by 58,000, which is on par with the 60,000 new jobs that had been generally expected among economists polled by Briefing.com. Meanwhile, private payrolls increased by 137,000, which came on top of the upwardly revised 42,000 jobs that were added during the prior month. An increase of 83,000 had been broadly expected.

The number of people entering the workforce was roughly the same as the number of workers who found jobs in September, so the unemployment rate remained at 9.1%, which is exactly what had been expected. However, job gains were mostly part-time, resulting in an increase in underemployment that took the "real" unemployment rate up to 16.5% from 16.2% in the prior month.

Even though the payrolls report proved better-than-expected, stocks lacked leadership at the open of trade. That made it difficult for the major equity averages to extend their streak of gains to a fourth straight session. The listlessness of early trade left stocks to slide into negative territory. Selling intensified in response to news that analysts at Fitch cut their ratings on Italy and Spain. At its low, the stock market was down more than 1%.

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