| There was another two-sided trade in the S&P500 on Wednesday, which was mainly due to mixed economic data, and oil price swings. Before the market opened a report was released that normally doesn't affect the markets very much. Like the recent ECI data point, today was different. Wednesday's pre-market data were the ADP employment figures. They were much worse than expected. ADP payroll information is a private estimation of the monthly jobs report that actually uses pay-stub data for its estimation. Said another way, unlike the government, it doesn't guess based on "econometric models." Nevertheless, this ADP print is usually ignored as traders wait on the government's official guess, despite the fact that it will revise and re-revise its numbers. Useless, actually. The morning's consensus was for a reading of 215,000 jobs; however, the real number was even lower than the lowest estimation at just 185,000 jobs. It was the biggest miss since March and nearly 20% lower than this time last year. Did the market drop on the bad news? Of course not. In fact, it rallied like mad. Once again "bad is good" as traders saw this as a sign that the Fed's largess will continue unabated by leaving rates unchanged. After the open, ISM Services data were released. This measures the "service" industry strength or weakness, which would include the hiring of bartenders, waiters, and hairdressers to name a few. It jumped to its best level since 2005 and scored the largest month-on-month gain in history with a print of 60.2. Did that then reverse the idea that Yellen would keep rates on hold; the opposite of the earlier report? Of course not, that would require selling and who wants to do that? Well, markets did eventually slow to a crawl as the mixed data points made traders scratch their heads in confusion for some time. But it was the plummeting oil market that sent shares lower in the mid-morning. Despite oil data showing a bullish 4.4 million barrel draw-down in crude oil inventories, its initial surge was used as as excuse to sell. Once it reversed lower, it gathered speed quite quickly. Reminded that this is very bad for indebted oil firms across the nation, traders decided to sell the indices across the board. So as you can see there were a few mixed signals and mixed reactions to a pretty clear report: oil. This may continue Thursday as traders wait for Friday's government jobs data. Trade well and follow the trend, not the perma-bull OR perma-bear "experts." Behold the age of infinite moral hazard! On April 2nd, 2009 CONgress forced FASB to suspend rule 157 in favor of deceitful accounting for the TBTF banking mafia. | 
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