Stocks Profile

Each month, ADP presents its estimate of what the Labor Department will report a day or two later. It’s like a publicly available economist’s estimate, yet the stock market and the popular press anticipate it and react to it as if it were a reflection of an economic reality. If it were perhaps more accurate, or better said – more reflective of the data the government reports (which may or may not be accurate), then it might move the market, but the data has lost its punch over the years, in my view.

Now that we’ve discounted the market impact of the data, we’ll progress to report it to you.

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(Reuters) Stock index futures pointed to a mixed open on Wall Street on Friday, with futures for the S&P 500 down 0.1 percent, while futures for both the Dow Jones and the Nasdaq 100 were up 0.1 percent.

* Data at 1230 GMT is expected to show that U.S. companies stepped up hiring in June as the economy recovered from a stumble in recent months, although job growth was not expected to be strong enough to eat into high unemployment.

* Nonfarm payrolls are forecast to have risen by 90,000, according to a Reuters survey conducted last week.

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Medical billing and records software provider athenahealth Inc (ATHN – Snapshot Report) has been chosen as a vendor for electronic health record (“EHR”) solutions by Wisconsin Health Information Technology Extension Center (“WHITEC”).

WHITEC is the designated regional extension center (“REC”) for Wisconsin. It is responsible for assisting health care providers across the state in the adoption and implementation of EHR systems and helping them to become the meaningful users of EHR and qualify for the federal incentive program offered by the HITECH Act.

The HITECH Act was enacted as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (“ARRA”).

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ECB Raises Rates
The ECB raised its key rates as expected, hiking the rate for the main refinancing operations of the euro-system by a quarter point to 1.5%. The ECB also raised the rate on the marginal lending facility by a quarter point to 2.25% and the rate on the deposit facility by a quarter point to 0.75%. The actions were widely expected by the broader financial markets after ECB Chief Trichet forewarned of the bank’s inflation concerns.

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