Nailed it. Sort of.

What was it I said in this week’s macro preview about the 70,000 consensus (it was closer to 60,000 at the time) for Friday’s NFP headline? This, I said this:

Economists will tell you there’s some math behind the consensus, but if we’re honest, it’s a total shot in the dark. I’d be no more surprised by +189,000 than I would be by -67,000.

You guys and gals can believe this or not, but I swear to Christ (for whom I have the utmost respect, as evidenced by my assiduously reverent attitude towards organized religion) I originally wrote, “I’d be no more surprised by +167,000 than I would be by -67,000,” but it felt too repetitive from an editorial cadence perspective, so I changed “+167,000” to “+189,000.”

Fast forward five days and the NFP headline for October was — drumroll — +165,000, a huge beat which validates my assertion that the uneven nature of hiring in America has made forecasting the BLS release a game of drunken, blindfolded monkey darts.

Revisions to headline hiring for September and August were positive, and meaningfully so. Recall that September’s tally, as initially reported, was a lackluster +29,000. That was revised up by 31,000 and August’s total by 53,000, leaving those headlines at +60,000 and +186,000, respectively.

The three-month average for the NFP headline’s now +137,000, the highest since May and nearly triple the average one-month gain over the last year. The private hiring print doubled up consensus with a 159,000 gain.

Notably, hiring gains were led in October by professional and business services, the sector most vulnerable to AI disruption. Hiring there increased by 70,000, which the BLS noted was nearly quintuple the average gain over the prior 12 months. That category showed a large loss in the ADP update earlier this week.

Health care chipped in 42,000, transportation and warehousing 25,000 and manufacturing 19,000, bringing the cumulative factory job gain to 101,000 since December (remember: The ISM manufacturing headline’s been north of 50 all year).

Consistent with the read-across from ADP’s new and improved “Pay Insights” data series (I told you to pay attention to that, dammit), average hourly earnings came in warm at 0.4% MoM and 3.1% YoY. That latter readout was two tenths above consensus. (Nobody say “wage-price spiral.” Don’t think about pink elephants.)

On the household survey side, the unemployment rate surprised to the downside at 4.141% from 4.175% in September.

The undershoot on the jobless rate looked even better in the context of an increase in participation, which blipped up to 61.9%, the highest since March.

Macro bears were let down by the household employment tally too. It showed a 463,000 gain on top of September’s 406,000 advance. Note that the household survey employment level is up 1.438 million in just three months.

Suffice to say this was an all around beat on the world’s single-most important macro metric from the outfit formerly known as the world’s preeminent macro statistics agency. There was nothing for Fed doves here.