This morning we had another anemic job report with only 113,000 jobs added, yet once again the headline read the unemployment rate fell to 6.6. We believe that statistically this is not accurate, but this has been the trend for some time. Granite Group places less emphasis on lagging indicators like the job data , but this data does show that the US continues to struggle. More important are the earnings of public companies and how they affect stock prices. So far, of the 337 companies in the S&P 500, 69% beat on earnings and 58% have beat on revenue. The S&P 500 revenue growth rose by a surprising 3.6%. The earnings and revenue beats are around the average and affirms that we are not in the beginning of a bear market, but are in a healthy corrective mode. We do caution that volatility will be here for quite some time, but Granite Group’s S&P target of mid-single digit return range for 2014 is still intact.
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