Good News Is (Fill In The Blank)?

You now have your choice. Is headline news Bullish? Bearish? Confusing? Deceptive? Orwellian? It could be all of these and then some.

After 7 years of “emergency”, Fed monetary policies (QE & ZIRP) is the coming normalization too scary for investors for addicted bulls to handle? That may be since these policies have lasted much too long since the emergency had passed years ago.

Friday’s Employment Report (271K jobs vs prior 137K & Unemployment Rate 5%) had bulls frantic early as the headline report seemed overwhelming too positive meaning an interest rate hike was now a lock for December.

But then a look behind the data displayed some negative or deceptive data.First 94.5M people are no longer working or in the data with the participation rate was lowest in 38 years. Further, new jobs consisted of 378K to those 55 and over while -35K to 25 to 55. Finally, the quality of new jobs went to the lowest job categories as shown below.

Consumer Credit this day expanded to a record $28.9 billion, or 4.9%. Most of this, $22 billion was Student Loans and Auto Loans. Who owns most of this debt? Well, you do.

So, you think I’m negatively biased? The data is real and I’ll leave it at that. Besides, the bullish financial media won’t cover this as they don’t sweat the details. 

Stocks traded on both sides of unchanged only to finish modestly higher on the day. Weakness was due to fears an interest rate hike was “a lock” as some suggested while bulls shrugged it off making it business as usual.

I’d say there were plenty of Sovereign Wealth Funds biding stocks higher. It was reported the Swiss National Bank purchased another 900,000 shares of Apple (AAPL) during the previous quarter taking their holdings to nearly $1.2 billion or 9 million shares.

Market sectors moving higher included: Financials (XLF), Banks (KBE), Small Caps (IWM), Transports (IYT), Hedged Europe (HEDJ), Hedged Japan (DXJ), Shanghai (PEK), Italy (EWI), Dollar (UUP) and few others.