Why Friday’s June Unemployment Report Already Looks Sloppy

With this report coming on Friday, July 5, 2013, many of the A-team members of the trading community and many major investors will not even be in. For anyone that can take the time off, this will be a four- or five-day weekend. Many people will not even know that the number came out, and many may not care.

The reality is that such an important number happening on a light-attendance trading day could pose risks to the stock and bond markets. Any serious difference from this report could be accompanied by unusually large moves of a sort that might not happen if all market participants were there.

The formal employment report is scheduled for Friday, but here is a look at some of the preliminary jobs data, with consensus estimates from Bloomberg:

• WEDS 7:30 a.m. Challenger Job Cut Report
• WEDS 8:30 a.m. ADP Employment Report (165,000 est.)
• THURSDAY U.S. MARKETS CLOSED
• FRI 8:30 a.m. Weekly Jobless Claims (345,000 est.)
• FRI 8:30 a.m. Nonfarm Payrolls (161,000 est.)
• FRI 8:30 a.m. Private Sector Payrolls (175,000 est.)
• FRI 8:30 a.m. Unemployment Rate (7.5% est.)

As far as what happened a month ago, the gains in nonfarm payrolls rose 175,000 for May, after rising a revised 149,000 in April. The official unemployment rate ticked up to 7.6% from 7.5% in April, at a time when the expectation was only a 7.5% unemployment rate.

You can largely ignore the weekly jobless claims this week, as they will be concurrent with the unemployment release. That timing is a very strange one when both are released simultaneously. Generally it happens only every few years.

Getting weekly claims at the same time as the employment report on a day when the public and the investing community will have low interest makes this report feel very skewed even before the event.

UPDATE: The Challenger report showed nearly 260,000 jobs cut, the ADP report showed 188,000 new jobs added, and weekly jobless claims — released Wednesday — fell to 343,000.