Goldilocks play pushes stocks to record highs

LAST week, stocks finished at record highs despite a weak jobs report as traders' attention turned back to Goldilocks and the Federal Reserve.

The tentative rally is likely to continue this week as long as there are no more nasty surprises from US data or Ukrainian battlefields.

During August, the US economy added only 142,000 jobs, far short of the monthly average of more than 200,000 so far this year. While August data is notoriously unreliable because almost everyone - including the survey-takers - takes a holiday, there likely was some slowdown in growth. Traders bought into shares after the report because of the Goldilocks theory, which states that the best economic growth is that which is hot enough to increase corporate profits but not so hot as to prompt a Fed interest rate hike.