As of the writing of this post early Friday morning, both gold and silver spot values are moving downward. Though this downward movement is nothing too significant, it is an early indication that perhaps the market thinks today’s US jobs report will beat expectations. Though it is still too early to tell exactly what today’s jobs figures from November will look like, I can say that expectations are for at least 230,000 jobs to have been added during last month.

In addition to today’s jobs data, investors also had the European Central Bank meeting as well as some other economic data to contend with. For the most part, however, none of the aforementioned events or data points had all that much of an impact on the precious metals market. With that being said, however, I imagine that today’s jobs data will be of particular importance to quite a few investors.

What to Expect From US Employment Data

Knowing what to expect from the United States’ monthly employment report is one of the most difficult things to do. Even expert market analysts have a hard time pinpointing just how well or poorly the US Labor market performs in a given month. Still, it is widely believed that today’s data will show that at least 230,000 new non-farm jobs were created in the US last month.

With that said, however, it is important to remember that this number of job additions was expected a month ago, and that data fell far, far short. Officially, last month’s employment data for October showed that only a little more than 200,000 new jobs were added to the US economy. This sub-par report gave gold and silver a temporary boost, so the thought is that, should this week’s report be poor, it will also cause metals to appreciate a bit.

When the employment data was made public, it showed that well over 300,000 new jobs were added to the US economy during November. Though the unemployment rate remained unchanged at 5.8%, this number handily beating expectations caused the spot values of gold and silver to take another dive of sorts. Still, metals look to be ending this week in much better fashion than they ended last week.