By Greg Peel<\/p>\n
The Dow closed up 48 points or 0.4%. The S&P rose 0.3% and the Nasdaq fell 0.1%.<\/p>\n
The Dow peaked earlier at +122 before Wall Street decided to go to lunch and not come back. Profit-taking after a positive but trying week killed off the early rally which was sparked by a largely positive jobs number. The Nasdaq became the odd man out when tech frenzy got a bit of a wake-up call. Sun Microsystems’ poor result saw its shares fall 22%.<\/p>\n
The April jobs figure showed a fall of only 20,000 jobs when a figure of 75,000 was the consensus. The unemployment rate, which many had presumed would rise again, fell from 5.1% to 5.0%. This was a positive influence and the mood was boosted by an increase of 1.4% in March factory orders when only 0.2% was expected.<\/p>\n
The US dollar continued its recent buoyancy on the news, the euro falling again to US$1.5424. However, the positive economic data provided confusion for commodity prices, which shrugged off a rising dollar and squared back after some significant falls this week.<\/p>\n
Gold rose US$3.70 to US$855.60\/oz after having tested support at US$850 yesterday. The Aussie was little changed at US$0.9351.<\/p>\n
Base metal prices were mostly stronger in London, led by copper and aluminium which both clawed back 2%. Metals are finding it difficult to speculatively reverse on the stronger greenback as warnings of supply weakness intensify. The positive US data also challenges any reasons to sell.<\/p>\n
Wheat also found its way back 2.5%.<\/p>\n
And it was back to normal programming for oil. The Turkish government must be long crude, as after oil finally looked like it might fall below US$110 again Turkey decided to fly a couple of bombing raids into Kurdish northern Iraq. Here we go again. Oil jumped US$3.80 to US$116.32\/bbl, which would have also helped the decisions to profit-take late in the stock market.<\/p>\n
The SPI Overnight rose 60 points, which was a very strong response after a big day on Friday and nothing dramatic from the Dow. Given the ASX 200 closed right on very significant resistance at 5700 on Friday, the futures are indicating a solid break of that level on Monday. The market has tried to climb the mountain to 5700 on many occasions in 2008 before succumbing to weak influences. If a break of the level is emphatically consolidated on Monday, then we could be set for some real strength. It would be unsurprising if the index decided it better do a bit of work there first however.<\/p>\n
The ongoing internet war took another tedious step late on Friday as Microsoft supposedly upped its bid for Yahoo. The figure was not released, but is suspected to be US$35. The earlier offer was US$31. Whatever happens between Microsoft, Yahoo and observant protagonist Google will surely pique the interest of the antitrust watchdogs. This could go on for a while.<\/p>\n
Investment guru Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway announced profit of US$904m in the first quarter; 64% below the US$2.6bn the firm achieved in the first quarter of 2007. Bummer.<\/p>\n
Late News: Micrososft later withdrew its bid for Yahoo altogether. Yahoo told Micrososoft US$35bn was still pathetic and it wanted US$53bn. Microsoft’s response can’t be printed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A good jobs report kicked off a day that ended in mixed book-squaring ahead of the weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84],"tags":[32,23,29,24,22,26],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54197"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/staging.fnarena.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}