Stocks surge after stellar NFP

It's been a pretty volatile week for US stock markets, with equities taking a hit on some trade concerns and soft data in the first couple of sessions, but the recent release of an all round stellar jobs report from the world's largest economy has boosted sentiment and pushed indices higher. Futures are pointing to a green open for all US benchmarks and the S&P500 is now trading back above the level it was at 3PM on Monday when the disappointing manufacturing figures dropped.

• NFP employment change: +266k vs +180k exp. Prior: 156k (revised up by 28k)

• Unemployment rate: 3.5% vs 3.6% exp. 3.6% prior

• Average hourly earnings M/M: +0.2% vs +0.3% exp

• Average hourly earnings Y/Y: +3.1% vs +3.0% exp

Looking at the jobs data itself it's not only hard to find any weakness but hard to find anything that isn't strong with a large beat on the headline, upwards revision to the October data, and unemployment rate falling back to its lowest level in several decades. If you want to nit-pick you could say the M/M wage growth was a tad lower than expected, but this is more than offset by a better than forecast Y/Y reading and overall there's little disputing the strength of this release.