Friday’s jobs numbers were perfect for this bull market, but not because of the media’s focus on the new highs in QQQ, SPY and DIA.

Consider the advice and quote of legendary investor John Templeton, “Bull markets are born on pessimism, grown on skepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria.”

As I look at the reaction to Friday’s jobs report and the charts of the Modern Family I see a healthy dose of both skepticism and optimism.

As for the report, the non-farm payroll came in considerably lower than expected. At an earlier time in the life of this bull market such a miss would have sent the stock market plunging on fears that the economy was stalling.

Interestingly, this mature bull plays by different rules.

A common interpretation of the payroll weakness was that since the economy is slow but firm, the disappointing number of new payrolls was a sign that employers are having trouble finding workers to hire. If workers are hard to hire this must be a bullish economic sign as long as wages don’t inflate (which they didn’t). The bonds, however, were skeptical as demonstrated by their strong advance which indicating they saw economic weakness where stocks saw strength.

This type of dichotomy has been widespread in the markets ever since the end of 2014.

Over the last several years various areas of the market have cycled through their own bull and bear markets, and as a result the general market has been able to advance without widespread euphoria developing. In other words, market rotation has been the key to the steady bull market advance.

On Thursday, I pointed out how the Modern Family was suggesting that some of the skeptical members may be ready to swing back toward optimism.

More specifically, XRT, IBB, IYT, and KRE have all broken major multi-month support within the last month, but each has refused to breakdown, and in the case of IYT rally sharply.

Furthermore, IWM has climbed back to the top of its tight 6 month trading range.