Stock Market Rally Attempt Underway, But Faces Resistance; Oil

A stock market rally attempt tried to gain steam, with leading stocks flashing early buy signals. But the major indexes hit resistance at key levels and have not confirmed the new rally. A weaker-than-expected jobs report didn’t move stocks, but the 10-year yield kept rising on expectations that the Fed will go ahead with tapering bond buys. Crude oil prices are at multiyear highs.

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Facebook (FB) suffered a systemwide outage Monday, while a whistleblower testified before Congress about the social media’s profit-over-safety focus. General Motors (GM) aims to double revenue by 2030 on electric vehicles and self-driving cars. Tesla will move its headquarters to Austin, Texas, as it gets set to start rolling out FSD Beta to more customers. Crude oil prices hit record highs, but then backed off. Affirm (AFRM) surged on its latest “buy now, pay later” partnership.

Market Rally Attempt Underway

The Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq composite rose this past week, but hit resistance at key moving averages. None of them have yet confirmed the new rally attempt. Many leading stocks showed promising action, but generally stalled late in the week along with the broader market. The 10-year Treasury yield topped 1.6%, the highest point in several months, despite a weak-to-mixed jobs report. Crude oil prices hit multiyear highs.

Jobs Weak, But Enough For Fed?

The U.S. added just 194,000 jobs in September, far below view. But the headline figure partly reflected a surprise 123,000 drop in government jobs. Also average hourly wages rose 4.6% vs. a year earlier while the average workweek expanded. The jobless rate tumbled to 4.8% from 5.2%, due to people leaving the labor force even as the household survey showed the ranks of the employed grew by 526,000.

Economists generally expect the Fed to go ahead with tapering bond buys at the November meeting.

Facebook Woes Continue

Former Facebook (FB) employee turned whistleblower Francis Haugen gave hours of damaging testimony at a Senate hearing, saying the social media giant consistently placed profit above safety and was harming teenage females on Instagram with negative messages, among other allegations. The hearing was the culmination of an in-depth investigation and series of articles by the Wall Street Journal, based on thousands of documents Haugen gathered. The Facebook hearing is expected to lead to more hearings and regulations. Meanwhile on Monday, Facebook, Instagram and other FB properties were offline for six hours. FB stock fell solidly, the fourth straight weekly decline.

Tesla Moving HQ To Austin

CEO Elon Musk said at a shareholder meeting on Oct. 7 in Austin, Texas, the company would move its headquarters there from Palo Alto, Calif. Meanwhile, the FSD Beta 10.2 version of self-driving technology was to release at midnight on Friday to about 1,000 owners with perfect safety scores. On Oct. 2, Tesla reported strong Q3 deliveries, despite chip shortages hampering production industrywide. Tesla…