May 3, 2024

Markets:

Stock futures rose sharply Friday as investors prepared themselves for the upcoming April jobs report, due Friday morning.

In extended trading, Apple advanced more than 6% after it announced a $110 billion share repurchase and a top -and bottom-line beat. Biotech Amgen
surged 14% after posting better-than-expected earnings and revenue numbers, while Cloudflare lost 14% after reporting weak guidance on revenue for the full year.

At the conclusion of the Federal Reserve’s meeting on Wednesday, Chair Jerome Powell appeared to rule out a hike as the central bank’s next move, but that doesn’t necessarily mean traders should begin hoping for cuts in the near future.

On Friday, the central bank and all of Wall Street will be eyeing the April nonfarm payrolls report, with close attention to changes in wages.

Economists polled by Dow Jones are expecting 240,000 positions to have been added, marking a slowdown from the 303,000 jobs gained in March. They also anticipate that average hourly wages grew by 4% year over year, and they expect the unemployment rate to hold steady at 3.8%.

Portfolio:

If it were not for Yellen's comments and the turn we experienced earlier in the week, I would love to see where we would be sitting at technically right now. But regardless, AAPL delivered. FOMC delivered. And now we wait for payroll data. We continue to build but still not on the launch pad we want to be on for next level movement. That's coming, you see it building here. We enter the session holding set-ups in TSLL, AI, PLTR, PATH, and S. It's Friday, so always expect swings. We are positioned well for the next week. Queue continues to ignite and love to see it but we want a bit more confirmation on levels here with the overall market. Now that we have all that "terrible news" out of the way that was supposed to send the market back down to zero this week, lets look for another higher low to in the Q's. I hope folks truly do see what's building…every time they try to create an event to "send the market lower", we snap into lower highs and continue to build.