Market check: Stocks edge higher as traders digest jobs report

Yahoo Finance's Jared Bilkre details how stocks are up after traders digest the jobs report.

Video transcript

BRIAN SOZZI: Let's head down to the New York Stock Exchange and see what Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre is watching. Jared, what is the buzz about the jobs report?

JARED BLIKRE: Kind of a strange direction here. Trying to make heads and tails of it. Big discrepancies between some of the numbers between the establishment report and the establishment survey and also the household survey. 1.1 million jobs added in the household doesn't really square with the [? 200,000 ?] plus in the establishment.

So when you put it all together, the market really didn't react that much. That was the initial reaction right after we broke the numbers. That's what I was seeing on the screen, and not much has changed since then. You would think there would be more of a reaction in the bond market, but the bond market is actually pretty calm right now, and it's just kind of consolidating some of the huge moves and volatility that we've seen earlier in the week.

So I think the big takeaway for me is this jobs-- this jobs report wasn't going to move the needle one way or another anyway. I think if the wage growth had come in a little bit hot, it might have put even more pressure on the Fed. You might have seen more of a reaction, more of a risk-off reaction, but just didn't really happen that way.

So I think people are going to be looking ahead to the next catalyst. And, of course, that's going to be the Fed meeting in the middle of the month. Looking forward to that. It's going to be a real page turner, especially getting to look at the SEP, the Summary of Economic Projections, and what the Fed officials are seeing with respect to the economy because it looks to me and to a growing number of analysts that the Fed may get caught behind the eight ball. Certainly not a foregone conclusion, but with inflation pressures mounting and some of the rhetoric-- I mean, you take a look at what outgoing Vice Chair of Supervision Clarida was saying yesterday-- or Randy Quarles, excuse me, was saying yesterday. Pretty telling that-- pretty, I guess, hawkish words of trying to fight inflation, comparing it to a war and such.

So the big takeaway for the markets I think is simply that we're going to have to wait for that next catalyst, and it's really all about the Fed right now and what are they going to do with monetary policy and with the variant headwinds?

BRIAN SOZZI: All right, Jared Blikre, thanks so much.

All right, it is Yahoo Finance's Stat of the Day time. The market roller coaster of the past week apparently has thrown the bulls out of the car. Bullish sentiment on stocks has fallen 21.3 percentage points in the past three weeks according to the latest survey from the American Association of Individual Investors. The team at Bespoke points out that this is the largest three-week decline in bulls since March 2018.