Ahead of Wall Street - February 1, 2012 - Ahead of Wall Street
February 01 2012 - 4:12AM
Zacks
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Favorable manufacturing data out of China and Europe appears to
have put U.S. stocks in a positive mood today even as we wait for a
key manufacturing report of our own a little later. The market will
also be trying to handicap the all-important jobs report on Friday
from this morning’s in-line reading from payroll processor
Automatic Data Processing (ADP).
A total of 170K private sector jobs were in created in January,
according to the ADP, matching expectations. On the negative side,
the jobs numbers for December were revised downwards by 33K to
292K. The big deceleration from the December notwithstanding, the
ADP report is still ahead of expectations for private sector jobs
in Friday’s government jobs report. The gains were broad based
across industries and business sizes. More than half of the January
job gains came from small businesses with less than 50 employees.
Medium sized businesses, those with less than 500 employees,
accounted for most of the rest of the gains.
The ADP tally sets the tone for Friday’s government jobs report,
which is expected to show headline job gains of around 130K. The
drop from the December level, when 200K jobs were created,
primarily reflects the reversal of one-time gains that month due to
seasonal factors. The overall trend on the labor market front
remains favorable as confirmed by the steady downtrend in the
weekly Jobless Claims data. I would expect the employment component
of the manufacturing ISM report, coming out a little later, to show
the same trend.
On the earnings front, we have Whirlpool (WHR),
the maker of Maytag and KichenAid branded home appliances, come out
with better than expected recurring earnings this morning on
roughly in-line revenue numbers. IAC Interactive
(IACI) beat earnings and revenue expectations. But the focus today
will be Amazon’s (AMZN) underwhelming report after
the close on Tuesday as the online retail giant continued to invest
in its own business. The company has quite a reputation for
sacrificing near-term profits for long-term growth and that
appeared to be the theme in this quarterly report as well. In other
corporate news, the pending tie-up between NYSE
Euronext (NYX) and Deutche Borse was nixed by EU
regulators on anti-trust grounds.
Sheraz Mian
Director of Research
AUTOMATIC DATA (ADP): Free Stock Analysis Report
AMAZON.COM INC (AMZN): Free Stock Analysis Report
IAC/INTERACTIV (IACI): Free Stock Analysis Report
NYSE EURONEXT (NYX): Free Stock Analysis Report
WHIRLPOOL CORP (WHR): Free Stock Analysis Report
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