Wall Street halted Thursday's violent slide (a completely unsuccessful end to October, with the S&P500 erasing 100% of its monthly gains in a single day) and started November on a moderately positive note.
The gains could have evaporated as the hours went by, given the heavy fall in the interest rate markets, with a symmetrical surge in yields from 1:45pm onwards, towards the worst levels seen since July 4.

In the end, the Dow Jones gained +0.7%, the S&P500 +0.43 and the Nasdaq (-2.8% the previous day) rebounded by +0.9% to 18,240... held back slightly by Apple (-1.3%) in the wake of brilliant but unsurprising results.
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The Nasdaq-100 (+0.7%) was driven upwards by locomotive Intel (+6.8%) and Amazon (+6.2%), not forgetting Atlassian with +19% (only $36 billion in 'capi' and $31 billion the previous day).
But the Nasdaq-100 was handicapped by Paypal's -2.6% and AMD's -1.5%... and, of course, rates, which only fell, only to rise again in the hours that followed.

The deterioration in rates had no apparent logical link with the NFP: the US '10-yr' fell by +10.3pts to 4.3900% (+15.5pts over the past week), the '30-yr' by +10.5pts to 4.5800%.... and the '2-yr' is up +12Pts on the week to 4.213% (August 1st level).

Such tension has no consistency whatsoever with any of the figures published earlier this week, and even less so with the 'NFP'.
The US economy is said to have generated just 12,000 non-farm jobs in October, instead of +113.000 (median consensus), according to the Department of Labor (DoL), after +223,000 in September.

"Employment continued its upward trend in health care and government, while declining in temporary help services, as well as in manufacturing due to strikes", explains the DoL.

However, the unemployment rate held steady at 4.1%, in line with expectations, while the labor force participation rate stood at 62.6%, and average hourly earnings rose by 4% year-on-year.

In addition, non-farm job creations for the previous two months were revised, from 159,000 to 78,000 for August and from 254,000 to 223,000 for September, giving a total revision balance of -112,000 for these two months.

Oddo BHF warned at the start of the week that "the labor market has undoubtedly suffered from a number of ups and downs in October".

But nobody was anticipating a -95% drop in job creation, which means that the figure is highly "biased" and will certainly be revised upwards significantly next month... This is the prediction of Joe Biden, who was quick to make a reassuring statement on the subject.

Another eagerly awaited figure is the US manufacturing PMI (calculated by S&P Global): it recovered slightly in October, coming in at 48.5 versus 47.3 the previous month, but remained below the 50 threshold which marks the boundary between expansion and contraction in the sector's activity.

S&P Global points out that production and new orders fell less sharply last month, while inflationary pressures weakened, and the recent hurricanes caused delays in supply chains.

Published separately, the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) index paints a less rosy picture for the US manufacturing sector, which contracted to 46.5 for the past month, compared with 47.2 in September.

The behavior of T-Bonds does indeed seem to reflect an outcome quite different from what the mainstream media, mostly pro-Democrat, have been anticipating for weeks, i.e. a victory for the Democratic candidate, favored by a female vote that is overwhelmingly in her favor.


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