Waiting For Friday

At the beginning of each month, investors dutifully pay homage at the temple of ADP and Bureau of Labor Statistics. The fact that the Federal Reserve picked unemployment rate as one of  the conditions for ceasing its quantitative easing operation marks the importance of jobs report. Today, the just released ADP report as reported by CNBC showed job creation below expectation.

Private-sector job creation was considerably less than expected in March, indicating that the labor market's improvements could begin stalling.

A joint report Wednesday from ADP and Moody's Analytics showed 158,000 new positions, well below economist expectations of 200,000.   

The report serves as a precursor to Friday's nonfarm payrolls report, so the miss could cause economists to lower their projections.

"I'm very optimistic about the economy but I think the next six months are going to be pretty tricky and we're going to see that in the job market," Moody's economist Mark Zandi told CNBC. "So I think we actually will see weaker jobs numbers in the next few months."

Stocks are selling off modestly after the report. For the past few years, economic activities have followed a notable pattern of strength at the beginning of each year and only to taper off in the summer months. The performance of stock markets have also generally showed greater upward vigor at the ends of each year compared to the middle. The relatively weak showing of March employment figure as measured by ADP certainly invites speculation that such patterns are still holding. However, this modest pace of economic activities in fact have served stocks well as the timeline for Federal Reserve's easy money policies may yet be extended again.

Now, let's see what the official jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics will bring this Friday.