The back-and-forth action continued in Friday’s session, and though the S&P 500 index futures weren’t quite able to finish on the weekly highs, they made it back to the 5800 area.
After a fairly benign overnight session, September’s employment report sparked volatility when it was released at 8:30am EDT with the following highlights:
| September Report | Actual | Expected | Previous |
| US nonfarm payroll | 254,000 | 150,000 | 159,000 |
| US unemployment rate | 4.1% | 4.2% | 4.2% |
| US hourly wages (MoM) | 0.4% | 0.3% | 0.5% |
| US hourly wages (YoY) | 4.0% | 3.9% | 3.8% |
The better-than-expected figures ignited a rally that went straight up past last week’s close and into the 5800 area. Unfortunately, resistance brought the premarket rally back into the 5790 area, where the regular session began. Bears and profit-takers continued to hit the bid, taking the index futures back down to test Thursday’s close. The action soon turned quite choppy, but the bulls were able to hold firm at unchanged, and started to gain back some ground.
Bears seemed to take the afternoon off, as buying became a lot more smooth in the final two hours. The bulls were briefly able to make a new high for the day in the final few minutes, but finished just under that level. The session concluded at 5800, gaining a healthy 50.50 handles. For the week, that makes for a marginal gain of 8.75 handles or 0.15%.
Among Friday’s developments, the probability of a quarter point rate-cut in November’s meeting jumped to 93.4%, and the probability of no cut in November went from 0% to 6.6% according to the CME FedWatch tool.
Tesla Inc (NASDAQ: TSLA) flipped its recent role and emerged as the biggest gainer among top components of the index. Investors now look forward to the company’s Robotaxi day on October 10th, and the EV maker was able to advance by $9.42 or 3.91% to close at $250.08 for the day.
That performance was over four times better than the cash index’s advance of 0.91%.
The biggest loser ended up being Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ: MSFT). For the day, the tech giant declined by $0.48 or 0.12% to close at $416.06.
