The 531K payrolls beat and Pfizer COVID-19 pill could influence the taper schedule. The 4.9% increase in wages should.

Energy and food prices might well fall over the coming months. But, wages are sticky. Whether due to contracts, minimum wage rules, or just market forces, they are very difficult to reduce. While it’s true that workers need higher wages in order to keep up with spiraling cost inflation, this is undoubtedly more fuel for the non-transitory inflationary fires.

Futures are up sharply on the news, which has the factors wondering what to do at ES 4700. Having delivered stocks (with a few trillion in help from the Fed) to all-time highs despite lackluster and occasionally bad news, what should they do with really good news that might speed up the taper?

Stay tuned.

continued for members…

The equity picture again shows some tension between the long-term rising yellow channels and the more steeply rising purple channels.  A few more days of this and we’ll see bears capitulating right and left.

Interestingly, VIX is not reacting. At all. It is still well off the rising purple channel bottom, and the falling SMA20 is going to force a bullish (bearish for stocks) 10/20 cross pretty soon if VIX doesn’t break down here.

Likewise, CL and RB continue to soften, with CL’s purple channel having clearly broken down. They can obviously continue to decline (to a point) without any concern for what it might mean for stocks. I think CL will reach the red channel bottom at 73.35ish by the end of the month… …and RB will flesh out the white channel at 2.10ish in the same period.There’s also absolutely no reason for USDJPY to break out just yet  – meaning it’s even more likely to continue softening with 112.53 a good test in the near future.

It will be interesting to see whether EURUSD finally breaks down… …allowing DXY to finally break out.With inflation in full bloom, you’d think yields would be racing higher. But, TNX is still correcting. If it doesn’t hold the red TL at 14.42ish, we’ll be looking for 10.70 or 9.2. Gold and silver are hanging in there, with both pushing back through short-term resistance. As long as GC can hold its SMA200 at 1792, the yellow target at 1862 looks really good.If it can get back on top of its SMA10, SI should get a crack at its SMA200 currently at 25.47. Bitcoin is basically treading water. It’s holding its SMA10, but seems to really want to backtest and consolidate at least some of its Oct gains. I still see a backtest of the cloud in the very near future, probably at 55,700ish. I have a number of conference calls this morning, so I’ll sign off for now and be back later with commentary if anything warrants it.

GLTA.