Betting on jobs report

And I really mean betting. All week long we've been hearing predictions of how many jobs would be gained or lost for April, as always happens in the days before the first Friday of each month. But now there's actually a futures market where traders can place bets on what the number will turn out to be. This exotic product provided no better insight on the April numbers than any economist. As Annelena Lobb reports on Marketbeat, payrolls futures settled at a forecast of negative 80,000 jobs on Monday, negative 70,000 on Tuesday, negative 60,000 on Wednesday and negative 75,000 yesterday. The actual number turned out to be negative 20,000. This is a very thinly traded contract, which tends to distort the ups and downs. “Traders [want] ways to commoditize and monetize information,” said Felix Carabello, director of alternative investments at CME Group, which oversees the trades. “Established commodities markets are pretty efficient – there needs to be another way to extract value.”

By the way, the prevailing view is that the job numbers may have been better than expected, but they're still ugly. "Nothing in this report changes our view that the trend in payrolls is lower and that the labor market will continue to be soft for some time," says Drew Matus at Lehman Brothers. The real question is your definition of soft.