It's NFP Friday, the most exciting economic data point in the world!
Even after more than 25 years in the game I still get excited by non-farm payrolls. There used to be a great anticipation for it on the LIFFE floor. The atmosphere was electric in the minutes leading up to the release, then the stone silence 5 seconds before, and the eruption 1-2 seconds after. Sometimes 30 minutes later you'd fall out of the pit feeling like you'd just run 10 miles. Great days and not quite the same sitting here in the London HQ of ForexLive, aka my upstairs office
Never mind, I have you lot to keep me company
On to the numbers then. Adam has his usual non farm payrolls by the numbers post and here are the current top 5 of Bloomberg's NFP guessers. Nariman Behravesh maintains the number one slot for IHS Global and Morgan Stanley enters the fray at No.2
- Nariman Behravesh - IHS Global 195k
- Ted Wiesman - Morgan Stanley 210k
- Gregory Deco - Oxford Economics 202k
- Max Clarke - IDEAGlobal 220k
- Intesa Sanpaolo 235k
Bloomberg consensus is for 226k and Reuters is 225k and the numbers above are mostly in the ballpark, but leaning to the downside, except for Intesa. Maybe IHS is taking a risk with a sub 200k number but he's hogging that top spot for a reason
We had the bounce back last month from the awful 85k for March and the market will want to be comforted that that was just a weather one off. If it's not and we miss by a lot we'll have ourselves a fun old afternoon, the same as if we have a grandstand number
Don't forget to enter our NFP competition which comes with the super prize of a copy of Greg's book, Attacking Currency Trends. Enter your guesses on the link here:- The ForexLive non farm payrolls competition
