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Considering how most Monday's have traded in the past, today was downright boring. But after last week's gains should it surprise us?

No economic reports today, and none on tap for tomorrow either.

Today's charts:



No real damage done here, still on a buy, but notice how high the 6 day EMA has risen. It could move higher, but every day increases the odds for some selling pressure.

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Time to take a look at the Top 15 and Top 50 going into this week's market action.




We can see that this past week the Top 15 got defensive, dropping their collective stock exposure from just under 70% to a little over 40%. Bonds have found a lot of favor here too with a 20% allocation. The collective position here is well hedged for any action.


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We "only" lost 36,000 jobs! Break out the champagne!

Nonfarm payrolls fell 36,000, which was better than the 68,000 that was forecast. The unemployment rate remained at 9.7%, which beat the 9.8% forecast. The underlying data suggested there was some job creation too.
But that increase is due to part-term workers being hired more than anything else and is certainly not indicative of a jobs picture getting better. I wouldn't call this data point more than neutral at ...

Another lackluster, low volume trading day, but a late day rally did help the major indicies post modest gains by the close in any event.

In today's data releases, pending home sales for January fell 7.6% vs an expected 1.0% monthly increase. January factory orders were up 1.7%, which was close to what was expected. Fourth quarter nonfarm productivity hit 6.9%, but was not much higher than the expected 6.3% target, and finally unit labor costs dropped 5.9% vs and expected 4.5%. ...

Well, the S&P 500 managed to briefly eclipse yesterday's intraday high, but it closed well below 1125, which means we are either pausing before springboarding higher or we have run out of steam.

The nonfarm payrolls data being released on Friday seems to be drawing attention away from other market data. The ISM Services Index for February came in at 53.0, which was above expectations, and the Fed's Beige Book revealed no surprises.

The dollar was lower and VIX dropped ...