January's jobs report blew the doors off the Wall Street consensus estimate when it was released a month ago, boosting the whole market and one Dow Jones industrial average member in particular that day and in the month since: Boeing. The plane maker is up more than 11 percent since that jobs report.
As CNBC PRO pointed out before that better-than-expected report, Boeing had a track record of being the best Dow performer on days when the nonfarm payrolls number exceeds the estimate by a large margin.
With expectations building for another blowout report Friday, CNBC PRO expanded its Kensho search to the whole S&P 500 in order to find more stocks that tend to be good buys when the job market is exceeding expectations.
The last jobs report beat the Street by more than 50,000. Traders don't expect another blockbuster like that, but they wouldn't be surprised, especially after the strong ADP employment report this week, to see another nice number.
(UPDATE: February's nonfarm payrolls rose by 235,000, higher than the 190,000 consensus of economists.)
According to hedge fund analytics tool Kensho, the nonfarm payrolls figure topped the consensus estimate by 20,000 jobs (0.5 standard deviation) on 44 occasions in the last decade. On the day of those reports, here were the top S&P 500 performers, on average:
