Welcome to Seeking Alpha's Wall Street Lunch, our afternoon update on today's market action news and analysis.

Good afternoon. Today is Friday, November 3rd, and I'm your host, Kim Khan. Our top story so far.

The October jobs report came in weaker than expected, which brought out stock and bond bulls.

A looser labor market would likely be the final piece

in the puzzle for the Fed and this tightening cycle. Non-fond payrolls rose by 150,000,

lower than the 180,000 expected.

The unemployment rate ticked up to 3.9%,

and average hourly earnings are 0.2%, softer than forecasts for 0.3%.

Channey's Gie Labah notes that there was a lot of noise from strikes worth about 30,000 up or down on payrolls,

while a downward revision of 101,000 tempered the gain in September, although it's still strong. Pantheon Macro says,

wage growth is slowing, the 3.2% annualized increase between July and October

was the smallest three-month increase since March 2021,

and is in line with pre-pandemic pace.

While the numbers are volatile, right now the numbers look good and they reinforce the message

from the ECI wages data and leading indicators, notably the quits rate, which is also back to its pre-pandemic level.

The report helped continue the Everything is Awesome Trade.

Yesterday productivity came in strong, but that didn't matter as the Fed won't hike.

Today jobs came in weak and that means the Fed can start cutting sooner.

Janis Labass says, there's nothing in the report that would advocate against the Fed's

current hold bias. The market odds of a rate hike in December fell to 10%,

while swaps brought in rate cut expectations to the June meeting. Stocks are higher with the

S&P 500 looking well on its way to its best week since June.

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