Breaking Wall Street Market News & Reports

Stocks spent most of the session at breakeven today, as the Street’s initial reaction to relatively upbeat retail and economic reports was somewhat muted ahead of tomorrow’s highly anticipated nonfarm payrolls report. On the retail front, the back-to-school shopping season boded well for many major retailers, with heavyweights like Costco (COST) and Nordstrom, Inc. (JWN) recording stronger-than-expected sales in August. Meanwhile, a second straight dip in weekly jobless claims, as well as a surprise increase in pending home sales last month, helped to overshadow a slimmer-than-anticipated rise in July factory orders. Against this backdrop, the bulls emerged from the sidelines as the afternoon progressed, with the major market indexes settling at session highs.

Looks like the shorts couldn’t make much of a push into the close, as the market found a nice buying late in the session. So far, September has been very kind to stocks, but with the always-important monthly jobs numbers out tomorrow, that could change in a hurry.

With the late buying spree I’m led to believe numbers tomorrow wont be bad after all.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 2nd, 2010 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Contributors, Stock Market News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.