That by now absolutely nobody can possibly take any number out of the ADP seriously is beyond question. For those confused why, just read "ADP "Cancels" 365,000 Private Jobs Created In 2012 [3]." And yet the establishment, and its very serious PhD pretend this "advance look" into NFP is relevant for one simple reason: it provides an anchor for HFT algos to send risk ramping, even though everyone knows it is a purely goalseeked, statistical aberation. To that end, moments before it was announced we tweeted the following:
October ADP "beats", ES jumps, then after one year it is revised lower by 50%
— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 1, 2012 [4]
Sure enough, seconds ago, the ADP reported that after its October number was revised from 162K to 88K, the November print just came out at 158K, on expectations of a 131K print (and a very serious sell side range of 80K to 170K). Now all we need is the October 2013 revision of this data series, which will say the ADP was only kidding and the number was really half of what was reported.
We would spend more time on this gross joke of "economic data" but we won't, as SecTres hopeful is currently on CNBC discussing how the ADP's goalseek.xls spreadsheet was fudged to make it more "credible", and also because the ADP website just crashed [5]to further validate how serious this economic datapoint truly is. "Automatic Data Processing" indeed...
Finally, here is how ADP "subtracted" 365,000 jobs [3]from 2012, as we explained yesterday:
[6]