Friday's session was defined entirely by a jobs report no one expected. The US economy added 162,000 jobs in August against a consensus of around 55,000, topping all estimates and arriving with upward revisions to prior months that partially dismantled the weak-labour-market narrative built over the previous fortnight. The result was swift and mechanical: the two-year yield climbed to 4.37%, the dollar firmed, gold was driven from an early high above $4,500 back toward $4,400, and EUR/USD was stopped out of its pre-data positioning at 1.1585. The most telling moment of the session was not the dollar's strength but USD/JPY's refusal to rally - the pair closed near 155.85, virtually unchanged on the day, despite a payrolls print that should have sent it meaningfully higher. When a pair fails to respond to its strongest catalyst, the structural pressure beneath it deserves respect.
Canada's simultaneous loss of 42,000 jobs against expectations of a 15,000 gain created the session's sharpest divergence, sending USD/CAD surging back above 1.3900 as the two employment reports pulled in opposite directions in the same twelve-thirty release.
With US markets closed Monday for Labour Day, the next critical input arrives on September 11 with CPI. That print, combined with today's NFP, will effectively decide the September Fed meeting. The positioning into that number - the levels to watch, the trades that are already loaded, and the asymmetric risk around gold and USD/JPY - is laid out in full in the complete briefing above. Subscribe to Markets Mastered for the daily analysis that gives you the framework before the data, not after it.