Factory Orders and Employment Trends Fail to Spark More Selling

December Factory orders rose by 1.8%. This sounds better than the poor negative preliminary fourth-quarter 2012 gross domestic product report of last week, but it is actually under estimates. Bloomberg had a consensus of +2.2% and Bloomberg was calling for +2.4%. If you exclude transportation, the factory orders were up only 0.2%. We even saw that the report on November factory orders was revised down to -0.3%, versus a preliminary report showing an unchanged reading.

What is interesting is that the Conference Board also reported its monthly Employment Trends Index, showing that January was lower but that the overall trend in recent months remains up. We should have known already about this, for the most part, due to last Friday’s employment situation report. The Employment Trends fell to 109.38 in January from 109.47 in December. That being said, this is still 2.7 percent higher than it was a year ago.

The DJIA is down about 90 points at 13,919 and the S&P 500 is down more than 8 points at almost 1,505.