The Firm Wall Street Revolted Against Totally Nailed The Jobs Report

REUTERS/Ilya Naymushin

On Wednesday, we wrote about the revolt on Wall Street against ADP for its perceived inaccuracy in predicting private BLS payrolls.

ADP stood by their methodology.

And this morning, ADP appeared to have been vindicated, having predicted 191,000 private payrolls on Wednesday. The actual figure was 192,000.

That difference is almost completely statistically insignificant.

"We stand by our numbers and methodology over time," ADP spokesman Dick Wolfe emailed, after the numbers hit.

Pantheon Ian Shepherdson and ThomsonReuters' Jeoff Hall were among the most prominent critics of ADP's forecast.

And their reaction to today's results was basically: Whatever.

Jeoff Hall

In an email, Hall said that because we are in a "trending" labor market, "trimming" the mean from data provided by IFR Markets, which involves discarding the high and the low over the past 12 months, summing the rest and dividing by 10, is usually just as accurate as ADP.

"While we tipped our cap to ADP this morning, we note that had they (or we) relied on the trimmed 12-month mean through February, they (or we) would have had nearly the same precision (see table)," said Hall.

Shepherdson, meanwhile, Tweeted this:

So let's see what happens next month.