Good morning and welcome to another week on the ABC markets and finance blog.

Stephen Letts from ABC business team limbering up for a blow-by-blow coverage of the day’s events, where every post is hopefully a winner, but none should be construed as financial advice.

The post comes with an advisory warning. Today is not shaping up as particularly happy session on the ASX and perhaps not one for the squeamish.

Futures traders have priced in a 1.3% fall on opening after a fairly savage reaction to disappointing jobs data in the US on Friday.

While the 142,000 jobs added in August came in around 20,000 below consensus, the downward revision of jobs created in July to 89,000 focussed the market on the idea that the US economy was much weaker than thought and maybe the Fed has been too late in cutting rates.

The S&P 500 dropped 1.7%, the Nasdaq fared worse, down 2.6%.

Chief market strategist at MDB Capital in New York, Lou Basenese, told Reuters the weak job figures suggest the Fed, by delaying cutting rates until September, may now be too late to guide the economy to achieve a soft landing.

“If we start seeing layoffs in the next month or two, it’s going to suggest his timing was too late,” Mr Basense said.

“Stocks are going to go down until next week when the Fed makes it definitive that they’re cutting, which could put pressure on them to do 50 basis points versus 25 bps. I think 25 bps is all but guaranteed.”

The selling was particularly severe across Wall Street’s “Magnificent Seven”: Nvidia (-4%), Tesla (-8.4%), Alphabet (-4%), Amazon (-3.7%), Meta (-3.2%), Microsoft (-1.6%) were all beaten up (or is that beaten down), while Apple was only moderately bruised (-0.7%).

The chipmaker, Broadcom, fell 10% after missing its fourth quarter revenue forecasts.

About the only thing going up was the VIX, Wall Street’s so-called “fear index”, spiking up more than 12% to its highest level in a month.

The jobs data also weighed on the oil price with Brent crude down 2.2% despite the decision from the OPEC+ cartel to delay increasing supply.

Brent ended the week at $US71.06 a barrel, a loss of 10% over the week.

The US dollar and 10-year US Treasury yields initially fell on the release of the jobs data but bounced back to be down just 1.9% to 3.71%.

The Australian dollar was little changed amid the US gyrations.

Apart from Chinese inflation (11:30am AEST) and Japanese Q2 GDP (9:30am AEST) there is not many set piece plays to watch out for today.

So, our focus is likely to be firmly on the market and what may well be a fairly rough ride.

“Be wary then, best safety lies in fear,” let’s get cracking.

Loading