Friday's 163K new jobs in the monthly employment report sent the future higher. But the opening advance exceeded expectations, reminding me of my childhood days in Daytona Beach, looking south toward Cape Canaveral at the trail of one of those early Vanguard rockets. "We have liftoff" was the phrase we hoped for. Well, Europe had a major liftoff on second thoughts about the ECB strategy, and the US jobs numbers helped. On this side of the Atlantic, the S&P 500 soared at the open and stayed in orbit throughout the day, closing slightly off the highs with a gain of 1.90%. What seemed like a losing week salvaged a modest 0.36% advance.
The index is now up 10.61% for 2012, which is 1.98% off the interim closing high of April 2nd.
From an intermediate perspective, the S&P 500 is 105.6% above the March 2009 closing low and 11.1% below the nominal all-time high of October 2007.
Here is a look at how major European indexes rebounded from yesterday's collapse.
And here's a snapshot of Friday's S&P 500 liftoff.
Below are two charts of the index, with and without the 50 and 200-day moving averages.
For a better sense of how these declines figure into a larger historical context, here's a long-term view of secular bull and bear markets in the S&P Composite since 1871.
These charts are not intended as a forecast but rather as a way to study the current market in relation to historic market cycles.