Stocks rise in early trading after Feb. jobs data
Stocks regained some lost ground Friday after a jobs report that was bad but not as horrific as many traders feared.
The Labor Department said Friday employers cut 651,00 jobs last month, and the unemployment rate jumped to 8.1 percent. The government also upwardly revised its December and January job loss figures to 681,000 and 655,000, respectively.
The readings were worse than analysts' estimates. Many market participants, however, had braced for even grimmer data, shorting stocks earlier in the week. To short a stock means to bet it will fall.
Wall Street had "anticipated bad news, and we got it," said Rob Lutts, president of Cabot Money Management.
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The market has been plummeting this week through barrier after barrier - the Standard & Poor's 500 index tumbled more than 4 percent Thursday to its lowest close since September 1996.
Though stocks might regain ground Friday given how far they've fallen, many analysts believe there is little keeping them from sinking further.
"My sense is we haven't discounted all the negatives out there as of yet," Lutts said. He added that investors have to account for not only the gloomy data from the government and companies, but also the pessimism of other participants in the market.
"It's not a scientific process by which stock prices are set," he said. "They're set by people. People are extremely emotional beings."
In early trading, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 40.94, or 0.62 percent, to 6,635.38. Standard & Poor's 500 index futures rose 3.96, or 0.58 percent, to 686.51, and the Nasdaq composite index rose 4.47, or 0.34 percent, to 1,304.06.
(Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)