Stocks closed mostly lower yesterday. Although, the Dow eked out a small gain. But the rest of the indexes were moderately lower.

There were a few attempts to move higher yesterday after Tuesday's losses, but those efforts were short-lived.

There may be some caution ahead of Friday morning's Employment Situation report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). At the moment, the consensus is calling for 160,000 new jobs to have been created in the month of August (a sizeable amount above July's 114K).

As you know, last month's weaker-than-expected jobs numbers tanked stocks. Even though it was what the Fed needed to see in order for them to finally agree to take action on interest rates, it apparently spooked the market for fear that the slowdown might turn into something larger.

Those fears were quickly discounted, and stocks shot back up.

But this will be the first employment report since then. And investors might be a little wary on two things: 1) if it's going to be a strong jobs report or not, and 2) will good news be considered good news or bad, and conversely, will bad news be considered bad or good?

It would be hard to imagine a scenario where the Fed doesn't cut rates in two weeks. But an overly strong jobs report could suggest a wait and see attitude afterwards, while an overly weak report might suggest a more aggressive rate cutting stance, but also fears that maybe the Fed waited too long.

All eyes will be on Friday morning's report.

In the meantime, we got a look at the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey report (or JOLTS for short) yesterday. It showed there were 7.673 millions job openings for July vs. the downwardly revised 7.910M for June (from 8.184M) and views for 8.1M.

Today we'll get the Challenger Job-Cut report, Weekly Jobless Claims, and the ADP Employment Report.

The ADP report is often looked at as a foreshadowing to the BLS report, even though it has a spotty track record of forecasting what the BLS report will say. Nonetheless, the consensus for the ADP report is for 140,000 new private sector jobs to have been created. That's in line with the BLS consensus of 136,000 private sector jobs. (The 160K headline number includes an estimate for 24,000 public sector jobs as well.)

In addition to today's jobs data, we'll also get the Productivity and Costs report, the PMI Composite report, and the ISM Services Index.

And even though earnings season is largely behind us, we'll get another 103 companies on deck to report including Broadcom, Samasara and Toro to name a few.

And we'll see if the markets can take another crack at bouncing higher ahead of tomorrow's jobs report.

See you tomorrow,