I should probably post something before heading to bed.

There were several minor employment reports today (ADP was the most significant, coming in at -22,000 non-farm, non-government, seasonally adjusted jobs for January). There was also the non-manufacturing ISM, which showed expansion, but missed estimates. It also failed to show employment growth for January. Yay, jobless recovery? Friday’s jobs report is still a bit of a guess, more dependent upon the seasonal adjustment process than anything else. Actual jobs will have been lost. People are complaining about the 824,000 jobs that will be revised away in Friday’s report, and the fact that the same models that created the surplus of fictitious jobs in previous employment reports has created even more jobs in recent reports, and will continue to do so, despite being known to be … optimistic. How many of the jobs it adds will prove to be illusory? That’s the million jobs question. What matters is whether or not January, when adjusted for the million jobs or so lost seasonally, will have added jobs. I think there is a good chance it did.

As an aside, some people go out of their way to attack critics of the birth/death model, pointing out that jobs do get created even in the worst of times. These people bother me. Even though jobs are created in the worst of times, other jobs are lost that are not adequately accounted for. As a consequence, the birth/death model shouldn’t necessarily be positive just because some jobs may have been created. The fact that it falsely accounted for 824,000 jobs should be evidence enough that the technique is at least worthy of a bit of criticism. That’s a noticeable percentage of jobs lost that were underreported because of an inaccurate model.

I started working on a tutorial for options trading, at someone’s request. I’ll probably post it here in parts when it is done. That may actually take a while as other things should have priority.

I saw Neil Gaiman present at UCSB tonight. He was awesome. That was the main reason nothing was posted until now.