Gapping Down On A Nonfarm Payroll Miss

The widely-watched Nonfarm Payroll report has been released, missing expectations by adding fewer jobs than expected, and stocks are showing a minor negative reaction.

Let's go back and look at other times that SPY gapped down at least -0.5% on a morning that the payroll report missed expectations:

There wasn't much of an edge there. One interesting wrinkle is that the S&P closed at a multi-week low on Thursday. So how about looking at times when the gap down on a payroll miss occurred after stocks had already sold off to a 3-week low heading into the report:

Here the returns are more consistently negative, mainly because it typically happened during the bear markets, but of course the sample size is painfully small.

Overall it's hard to read anything into this initial reaction. Future returns have been mixed from the opening print, even during the past five years.

Another notable move is in gold, tentatively looking to gap up more than 1%. The other times GLD gapped up 1% or more on a payroll miss, it continued higher during the day 9 of 11 times averaging a further gain of +0.3%. Its returns following that were perfectly inconsistent.