What's Happened-Europe Opened

First as we have known for sometime via commodity prices, China, which released their Manufacturing PMI saw a slight revision higher, still is in its 6th month of contraction. Within the sub-indexes of their PMI, employment was found to be declining at the fastest pace in 3 years. The trend though is what is most important and 6 months of contraction in manufacturing is not a good trend.

However Europe, as usual is where the damage was done.

ES overnight decline at the European open.

 April Eurozone Manufacturing PMI printed at 45.9 vs an initial print of 46.0, a 9 month low.Italy, Austria, Ireland, The Netherlands, Spain, Greece, France and most importantly Germany, all missed expectations, most printing at multi-month lows with Germany at a 33 month low and this is the manufacturing powerhouse of Europe.


Germany also had a bad unemployment report today. Italian unemployment gained .4% at 9.8%, youth unemployment rose from 33.9 to 35.9 in one month. The overall Eurozone unemployment printed at 10.9 which is the highest ever in EZ history.


In the US, the ADP Employment report had a big surprise and an ugly one at that. The ADP estimate of private employment growth was +119k for April, below the consensus expectation for a 170k gain.


US Factory Orders just released...


Released On 5/2/2012 10:00:00 AM For Mar, 2012

	Prior	Consensus	Consensus Range	Actual
Factory Orders - M/M change	1.3 %	-1.6 %	-2.5 % to 0.5 %	-1.5 %

The report itself doesn't look very surprising, but the prior of 1.3 was revised tower to 1.1, the 2 month 2.6 decline is the largest decline since 2009.


As usual, GLD reacted to the negative Factory orders report, remember gold is the new sentiment indicator for more easing and any bad reports are considered good for easing-hopeful traders.

Note the Factory Orders was released at 10 .m. , at the same time GLD moved higher.


Market Update up next.