Stocks Can Do Better Than Goldilocks

I always enjoy reading the postmortems after a big move in financial markets to see just how the news media explains it.

For example, Friday's 208-point surge in the Dow Jones Industrial Average was attributed to a report showing that the U.S. economy created 175,000 non-farm jobs last month even as the unemployment rate ticked up to 7.6 percent. The spin? The May jobs data weren't strong enough to deter the Federal Reserve from its $85 billion in monthly asset purchases, but not weak enough to create new concerns that the economy was losing steam. In other words, the news was just right, as Goldilocks might have said.