Playing Swami On Jobs

 +142,000… (BLS release).  I’ll not give up my day job as a market manager. They’d laugh me right out of the Sacred Society of Gurus. Hey, at least the Squid was worse; I read a blurb that Goldman predicted +215,000. 

I am the last person you will see playing Swami on important matters like when will the stock market’s bull end or when will gold’s bear market end.  One remains above the October 2014 lows and is thus in a biggest picture up trend and the other is still in a down trend, current bounce aside.

Those are simple parameters that cannot be argued with. You add in some tools, like gold ratios or bond relationships or sentiment profiles, etc. and you can add in probabilities to help form your narrative.

But this whole Swami thing? This ‘I burnished my reputation by calling the XYZ top or the ABC bottom’? That’s all promotion and pandering to peoples’ inner casino patron. I know I get obnoxious in hammering away at these guys and that is because they are promoters of a myth that any one genius is better at ‘calling’ the markets than the average genius.

The whole idea of making calls or predictions is flat out infantile if you ask me. It is much more rational to proceed in the boring fashion of carving out a probabilities-based plan and being open to revising it.

Preamble aside, I now play Swami again on the September Payrolls data because I figure hey, it can’t hurt anyone the way 50% of the gurus can at any given time (there are always really smart people on either side of the prediction game for a given market).

Considering that HP just laid off 32,500 people in what seems more a strategic than economic related move, and that jobless claims continue to burrow southward and that the good ship America is fully capable of at least temporarily dismissing its declining manufacturing activity (and hiring), focusing on the strong dollar’s services consumption benefits… drum roll please… +197,000 with the notion that HP skews the thing to the negative side but is not a fundamental consideration.