Weekly Economic and Stock Market Commentary: October 10, 2022

Well, that was an interesting week. No matter whether you were a bull or a bear, the week had both days of elation and days of aggravation. In the end, however, the markets did start the scary month of October with a gain for the major market averages.

The week started off with the best consecutive day gains in many years. Despite the strong movement on Monday and Tuesday, the amplitude of the oversold condition barely moved. Once again, we saw the clustering of tremendous market moves.

The commentaries of the past few weeks have been pretty heavy reading, so I am going to wrap this up on a lighter note.

The week ended with a bit of good news – although I am not ready to jump on it. The NYSE Bullish Percent turned positive and is on offense now. I don’t know what number of directional changes that are for the year, but I am sure we are in the teens. As I said many times over the years, things tend to be bad when the NYSE Bullish Percent Indicator changes direction many times. We need to look no further than 2022 to see this. Anyway, that gives us a split decision with WEALTH ACCUMULATION for the NYSE and WEALTH PRESERVATION for the OTC.

Remember, Xs mean OFFENSE or wealth accumulation, while Os mean DEFENSE, or wealth preservation.

Below is where our indicators stand as of October 7, 2022 (Courtesy Dorsey, Wright, and Associates).

The Department of Labor provided the only important economic news last week. The US economy added 263,000 jobs in September, which was in line with estimates, but well below the 315,000 jobs per month average of the first 8 months of the year. The unemployment rate fell to 3.5% as the labor force shrank. Average wage gains in September came in at 5%, which is slightly lower than August’s gains of 5.2%. However, that didn’t match the previously reported inflation gains.