Good Friday afternoon folks, or for some of you good Saturday morning (or maybe even good Monday morning). Whenever it is you get to read our newsletter, you probably don't need me to tell you the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell just a bit short of the 20,000 mark on Friday. It wasn't from a lack of trying though. In the meantime, the NASDAQ as well as the S&P 500 both managed to move to record levels. We'll look at it all in a moment, along with a detailed look at all the jobs numbers - as is always the case, the media did a poor job of telling you everything you needed to know. Before we get to any of that, however, we want to give you a heads-up.... on Monday morning we'll be sending a new small cap trading idea your way. I don't want to say too much about it just yet and end up letting the cat out of the bag. We'll just say this organization has seen some of the biggest headwinds "wearables" have been facing, and has developed a superior solution. In simplest terms, too many companies were so interested in form, they forget about function. This company's entry into the wearables market actually performs a marketable function people want done. It'll all make sense on Monday morning. Be sure to check your inbox right around the market's open. Today's market? I gotta say, the I'm surprised the buyers were this bold headed into a weekend. On the flipside, do note that the S&P 500 didn't actually push decisively past a key ceiling at 2277, nor did it break above the upper Bollinger band. Also notice the VIX wasn't able to pull below a floor of 11.20. Take a look. (And yes, we've got a new charting service, which we think we'll allow us to give you some more details as needed.) We're not making a call. We're just saying, there's still a way for the bears to pull the rug out from underneath the market here. Monday's going to be a pivotal day, as it will be the fifth day of the market's "first five days" hint. OK, moving on the proverbial "rest of the story" with Friday's jobs report for December... As a recap, last month's unemployment rate pushed a little higher, from 4.6% to 4.7%, though we added 156,000 new payrolls. It just so happens that a few more people than that made their way into the labor force without finding a job. Since it matters increasingly every month, the labor force participation rate and the employment/population ratio merit a closer look. Here they are, in all their disparate glory. You know what though? Like it or not, we're at or near full structural employment, meaning there just aren't a lot of people left who want to work that aren't working. They may not like the job they have, but they are working. We're not sweating the increase in the unemployment rate from here, nor are we sweating and the persistently-low employment/population ratio (which somehow isn't mirrored by a rise in labor force participation rate). Along those lines, know that the number of people who aren't being counted in the labor force but DO want jobs has fallen to very near a multi-year low, and continues to fall. There aren't a lot of ways to interpret all of this other than bullishly. And yet, if you feel like things aren't as great as they could be in terms of jobs, you're not crazy. One of the things we're going to focus more on in 2017 than we did in 2016 as a measure of employment health is wages... the only way we can effectively identify employment strength going forward. It's been the missing ingredient thus far, but now there's no other option for employers. To that end, here's the chart of hourly wage growth, as measured by the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. It's actually been getting better for a while, but it's only been within the past few months that wage growth has exceeded inflation. This has been sub-par wage growth compared to the cycles in the late-90's and early-2000's. But, at least it's growth. The other thing we now have every reason to start studying more often is the employment rate of people between the ages of 25 and 54. One of the key troubles of getting a bead on what much of the labor force participation rate and employment/population ratio has been factoring in the mass retirement of the baby-boomers. There are disproportionate number of them right now, and some of them are no longer in the work force, while others continue to work. It's skewed the overall numbers. So, to make sense of this nuance, the St. Louis Federal Reserve makes available the employment rate of all people aged 25 to 54. Take a look. It's still not the ideal measurement; people between the ages of 25 and 18 still don't represent the typical employment situation for all of the population. Nevertheless, this gets us closer to a firm understanding of what's going on employment-wise. Clearly things are getting better for this all-important sliver of the nation's demographic as well. We don't have a chart for it, but we do have the data - for people aged 55 to 64, 61.9% of them are working right now, which is not only above the nationwide average, but almost at a multi-decade high. It's difficult to say it's a mass retirement that's the cause of such lackluster participation rates. Bottom line? There are some headwinds still blowing, but the tailwinds are slightly stronger. Just thought you might like to have a little extra good news to get the weekend started. Don't forget to look for a new trading alert on Monday morning.