With the Mueller report scheduled to be released later today (as of this writing), preceded by the press conference with the attorney general this morning, the newspapers are on high alert. This report is being billed as a potential constitutional crisis and, if it doesn’t approach that level (as it almost certainly will not), as the beginning of the next round of political wars. Both sides have already started dialing up the rhetoric, without even really seeing what is in the report itself. So it goes.

In my recent post announcing my humble intention to beat the market, I intentionally begged a lot of questions. Most notably, what does it actually mean to beat the market? I did make a nod in that direction, pointing out that defining the problem properly is a prerequisite for solving it. Nonetheless, that question is what we will take a closer look at today.

We are now entering earnings season. After a great deal of worry and hyperventilating, we are starting to see some real data on how companies are doing this year. So far, the news looks good (at least according to FactSet).

I enjoy what I do. As an economic and market analyst, I get to play the most complicated and highest-stakes game there is—and get paid for it. Plus, I have the chance to spend quite a bit of time looking at, and thinking about, a wide range of data about pretty much everything. As such, there are a lot of ideas floating around that I flag and plan to come back to at some point.

I do quite a bit of speaking around the country, both to industry groups and to clients—the investors who really are the reason I do what I do. In general, the main topic is how to worry effectively about the markets and economy, including what I look at and why. Anyone who reads this blog knows the answers, as they appear every month in the economic risk factor and market risk pieces. But many clients aren’t into the whole story and want to know just the basics. So, that is what I try to give them.

The other day, we talked a bit about what the first quarter of 2019 could tell us about the rest of the year, but it provided only a high-level look. To help us understand what is going on as we approach the second quarter, today I want to dig deeper to evaluate what happened and why.

The jobs report (formally the employment report) is always important. In fact, there is no single more important economic fact than how the labor market is doing. This report hits all of the issues: job creation, unemployment, wage growth, and labor demand.

I have pretty much been ignoring Brexit over the past several weeks, apart from noting it as a risk factor. The reason was that there was no way to predict what could happen—and there were so many options that trying to analyze any one of them was, in the end, pointless.

I was thinking again about the interesting times post. I want to give another slant on it that might help people get through the interesting times that are likely ahead: to separate our Wall Street thinking from our Main Street thinking. If we keep our minds firmly on Main Street, we can ride out quite a bit of news without getting derailed. It is when we start listening to Wall Street that we can get into trouble. This may seem a bit odd, coming from me. I’m a Wall Street creature, right?

As we move to the close of the first quarter, we now have some data to think about what the rest of 2019 will hold. Let’s take a look at what we can reasonably conclude.