Yay! Its a No-NFP Non Farm Payrolls Friday !

Okay, so here is the deal: We have no report of the NFP data today.

The net impact of this? Nothing.
Total loss to the investment community? Nada.
Actual impact to the economy? Zilch.

There are two things we need to understand about this report: The first is what makes it significant; the second is the impact to your investments.

As we have detailed over and over again, any single monthly datapoint is hardly significant. What matters is the long term trend in employment — is the economy creating jobs or is it losing them? This refers to the trend, not any single noisy month. Most of the time, its fairly innocuous. At major turning points, it suggests either an expansion ending, and potential recession; or at the other end, a recession coming to an end and the eventual recovery. Both of these events will be reflected in consume rsentiment, retail sales and of course, corporate earnings.

The second detail is the impact of NFP on your investments. If you are a HFT, then this is a big data point, one that will give your algos a run for their money. If you are a long term investor, the monthly employment situation seems to be lots of noise, with very little signal.

So while the usual suspects will trip over themselves trying to explain the horror we face from this missing datapoint, you should be aware that it is far less important than is commonly claimed — unless you have 14 hours of airtime to fill each day.

BLS report is out at 8:30 am  . . .  Nope.

 

 

Previously:
NFP Day: The Most Over-Analyzed, Over-Emphasized, Least-Understood Data Point (February 4th, 2011)

Contextualizing the NFP Data (April 1st, 2011)

An Unusually Unusual NFP Payroll Day! (June 3rd, 2011)

THE MOST IMPORTANT EVER NFP blah blah blah (June 7th, 2013)

“What’s Your NFP Number?” [Don’t have one]  (August 2nd, 2013)

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