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We know a bunch of our readers connected Thursday's day off with the coming Saturday and Sunday to make it a four-day weekend, but for those of us who are addicted to the trading game, here we are, with plenty to talk about.

First and foremost, we hope you all had a great 4th of July, celebrating it however it is you do that. Second, though the market made progress today, you may want to take it with a grain of salt; we'll talk about that in a moment. Third (and we'll slice and dice this first), for some reason the market is celebrating what was good news on the jobs front this morning.

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Today's action was about as lethargic as we expected it to be, with many traders not even bothering to start something they knew they'd have to stop in the middle of the day. We'll still have a full trading day on Friday, though we don't look for it to be a particularly busy day either unless we got some wild new jobs number from the Department of Labor. On that note...

You probably already heard the ADP employment change report, but if not, the payroll company says 188,000 new jobs were created in June. That's way better than the 150,000 economists were expecting, but it's still not the whole story. We'd still like to hear from the DOL to see if its number jives with the strong ADP number. We'll wait until we get that data on Friday before taking a closer look at any of it for you. Today we'll go ahead and serve up the Q2 earnings preview.

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Welcome back everybody. We hope your weekend was a good one, but if not, you'll get another - and better - shot at a great weekend in just a few days. The calendar has cued up the 4th of July holiday for Thursday. Not only does this mean the market will be closed that day, but it also means Friday's apt to be very uneventful as traders stretch the holiday into a very long weekend. We'll be publishing the newsletter for you all the same on Friday, however, and given how it's the first weekday before earnings season begins, you might want to make a point of checking it out. We'll also have a Q2 earnings preview for you by then.

We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. We've got some other business we absolutely have to take care of today, including a look at today's surprising (to me anyway) action for the market. But, there's something even more important we need to take care of first.

Trade Updates

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Hello fellow traders. Hope your Thursday was a good one.

Well, stocks just posted their third straight day of gains. For some folks, that's convincing enough to merit piling back into the market. For me though, it's the exact opposite - this week's bounce has set up a perfect opportunity for the bears to pull the rug out from underneath the market, right when most traders don't expect it.

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Happy Tuesday folks. Just a couple of housekeeping items for you today - we can keep it short and sweet. Frankly, there's just not a lot to talk about market-wise until the indices find some direction... which didn't happen today.