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Welcome to the weekend, friends and fellow traders. As you can probably imagine, we've got a lot of stuff to get through today. So, let's just dig in and get started with the item most likely on your mind right now... the rest of the story on this morning's employment report.

The Rest of the Employment Story

First and foremost, of all the things to worry about on the jobs front, today's slight uptick in the unemployment rate (from 5.6% to 5.7%) is the one I'm worried about the least. The broad downtrend is still in place. And, we're seeing progress on other fronts that could actually put some near-term upward pressure on the unemployment rate. It's a good thing in the long run though. From the beginning...

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Hello folks. If it seems like you're receiving Thursday's edition of the newsletter way earlier than you normally do, you're not imagining it -- we ARE delivering it a few hours ahead of schedule. There's a good reason for the earlier-than-usual-send, though.... there's some information at least some of you will want to know before the closing bell rings. We'll get to it soon enough. There are a couple of other items we want to take a quick look at first before we get to the main event.

A Jobs Data Preview... and Postview

While there's been more than an average amount of economic data to sift through this week, truth be told, none of it is going to be as important or market-moving as what's coming on Friday - last month's employment snapshot.

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Do you w ant to know the best way to play the potential rebound in oil that has very little downside if the current bounce from crude isn't the real deal? It sounds too good to be true. And, to be clear, there are never any guarantees in this game. After digging deep into some data and giving this a couple days' worth of thought, though, I think I see risk/reward scenario very high on reward and very low on risk. Just hear me out and decide for yourself.

The Anti-Oil Trade

Last year wasn't the best year in the world for solar stocks. The flagship industry ETF, the Guggenheim Solar ETF (TAN), actually lost a little ground in 2014 while the broad market gained about 12%.

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Welcome back from the weekend, everyone, and for those of you who are football fans, what a weekend it was!

Yes, I was right on Friday when I said this year's Super Bowl was a pretty even matchup. On the other hand, my prediction the Seahawks would win as well as cover the spread was, well, wrong. It almost wasn't wrong, but "close" only counts and horseshoes and hand grenades. I'll also just add I probably would have been right about a Seahawks victory had head coach Pete Carroll not inexplicably decided to throw the ball when he had three chances to run the ball less than three feet... on a night his running game was working rather well, no less.

Yeah, yeah - I know it's easy to be a Monday morning quarterback. And, what a lot of critics don't appreciate it how Seattle only had one timeout and 30 seconds to run three running plays - he'd have been lucky to get two plays in, whereas an incomplete pass at least stops the clock. But, given the circumstances and how there was at least one time-out left (the Patriots likely would have taken a timeout as well), wouldn't you at least have to take one shot at running the ball and then set up a pass play after the run didn't work? Just sayin'.

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Welcome to Super Bowl weekend, everybody. Have we all picked a winner yet? It should actually be a decent matchup for a change. I'm personally going to go with the Seahawks to cover the spread of one point (as of the latest look) in favor the Patriots.

The odds line has been teetering a little on both sides for the past two weeks, and it may well teeter again before Sunday. Regardless, I think Seattle's going to be able to not just win, but cover whatever spread may develop in the meantime.... and not just because Tom Brady is going to be forced to play with fully-inflated footballs! Just for the record though, my Super Bowl picks haven't been all that great of late.

Of course, picking the game's winner is one of the least interesting Super Bowl bets you can make this year. Take a look at some of this year's strangest/funniest bets you can make: