It wasn’t a particularly bad jobs report. Wage growth rose by a higher than forecast 0.4%, taking the year-on-year figure to a 7 and a half year peak of 2.9% and though the headline non-farm figure underperformed at 156k against the 175k forecast, November’s reading was revised higher to 204k. It just wasn’t good enough to secure a market-wide rise, the dollar instead being the only major beneficiary, rising 0.8% against the Japanese yen, 0.7% against the pound and 0.3% against the euro. This helped surpress investors’ appetite for the Dow Jones, which merely sat flat at 19900 after the bell.
The weakened pound (it also dropped 0.5% against the euro) caused the FTSE to ease over the 7200 line with a 20 point increase, though it wasn’t enough for the index to match the intraday peak struck during Thursday’s trading. The Eurozone, meanwhile, was a dead-zone, with the DAX and CAC barely managing a 0.1% rise between them.
So that’s almost it for the first week of 2017. Bar that initially 7200-grazing flurry for the FTSE it’s been a painfully dull week, with investors seemingly reluctant to get on board with the all-time high-flirting indices, but content enough to let those same indices loiter just below a series of landmark levels. Though next week is even blander data-wise, a string of post-Christmas statements from the FTSE’s key supermarkets and retailers, and a dose of financial earnings from the US on Friday, could cause a bit more excitement.
