Economic Focus Renewed in Coming Week

Updated from 10/31/2009

Update includes CIT bankruptcy and Denbury purchase of Encore Acquisition.

NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- Earnings news has dominated attention for the past month, but investors in the coming week will finally be able to turn their focus back to important economic data, which will be in abundance over the next five trading days.

More than 340 of the S&P 500's constituents have reported earnings already, and 80% of those have beaten expectations, according to Thomson Reuters. That outperformance has helped direct investors' focus away from nearly a month's worth of economic releases, save for Thursday's report on third-quarter gross domestic product.

Weeks have passed since Alcoa (AA Quote) unofficially kicked off the third-quarter earnings reporting season on Oct. 6. Now investors find themselves at the beginning of November having breezed through two historically bad months for equities, unsure of which side of 10,000 the Dow will trade on for the remainder of the year.

"I don't think people are convinced at what the direction of the next 10% move will be," said Art Hogan, chief market analyst with Jefferies. "Earnings are now basically behind us, which is great news, but you're going to see the focus shift now to economic data, which has kind of snuck by us over the last few weeks."

And with the turning of another month in the calendar comes the inevitable: The Labor Department's monthly nonfarm payrolls report. The employment report, due Friday at 8:30 a.m. EST, should show that the U.S. economy lost 166,000 jobs in October, according to a Reuters poll of economists. The unemployment rate should tick higher to 9.9% from 9.8% in September.