Barring any late-day drama, Friday is shaping up to be a good proxy for the week: volatile, but with an upward bias.

The week provided yet another reminder of how negative sentiment continues to dominate. As you may recall, the market fell hard last Friday and there were a lot of people predicting stocks would suffer further this week, if not outright crash on Monday; or that, certainly, the rally had breathed its last.

From a contrarian perspective, this prevailing negativity is a bullish sign, as Wells Capital's Jim Paulsen told Tech Ticker.

As Henry and I discuss in the accompanying video, the stock market is now overvalued again after having become undervalued at the March lows, which may keep the Dow tethered near the 10,000 mark. But many stocks were priced last spring as if their future earnings would be somewhere between zero and nada...

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The unemployment rate rose to 10.2%, higher than expected and the highest rate since 1983. The labor force shrank by 31,000 which means the unemployment rate did not spike because of a surge of workers reentering the pool, as often occurs near turning points.

Non-farm payrolls fell by 190,000, which was more than the consensus estimate of 175,000. The higher-than-expected decline was somewhat offset by revisions of 91,000 for the prior two months and the fact the sub-200,000 decline continues the trend of smaller monthly declines.

The average hourly work week stayed at its lowest level since 1964 and the average length of time people are unemployed rose to 26.9 weeks from 26.2 in Sept and 22.5 back in May, according to Peter Boockvar of Miller Tabak.

Friday's report puts several of this week's big events into sharp relief...

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Microsoft still has dreams to the contrary, but Google has won the search game. With an estimated 70 percent market share worldwide and nearly $25 billion of revenue, the company has left the rest of the industry in the dust.

But what's next? Search growth is slowing, and there's not much more market share to gain. So unless Google wants to have all the sexiness of a utility, it needs to find another growth engine.

There are three possibilities, says Ken Auletta, author of the new book Googled: The End Of The World As We Know It:

• YouTube
• Mobile
• Internet-based applications (like email)

None of these businesses is as profitable as search, and Google has been trying to build all three for years.

But YouTube's new emphasis on professionally produced content has radically improved the unit's financial performance.

And as evidenced by the advertising blitz accompanying Motorola's new "Droid" phones, the mobile business is finally gaining traction.

Again, neither if these businesses currently have economics that look anything like those of the search business. But people didn't think much of search economics in the early days, either.

It's difficult to deny Google's transformative -- and disruptive -- power on many traditional businesses from newspapers to book publishing. Now a decade after its founding by two Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the digital media behemoth is experiencing growing pains -- while reaching for even more.

"And they're not always well-equipped for those challenges," says our guest Ken Auletta, author of the new book "Googled: The End of the World as We Know It." Based on more than a dozen visits to the tech campus, Auletta had access to the founders, CEO Eric Schmidt and about 150 present and former employees for the book.

Challenges ahead.

Not so fast, says Robert Prechter, president of Elliott Wave International and author of Conquer the Crash.

"Everybody who's saying ‘buy stocks' today or ‘buy real estate' is, I think, setting up people to get really hurt," says Prechter, who believes the bear market rally is reaching a major top.

"We had a great opportunity at [S&P] 667 - that was the big opportunity," says Prechter, who did make a bullish call last February. "The market is up 60% [from the March lows]. There's no way the S&P is going up 60% from here."

Prechter's advice for most investors, as described in the recently released second edition of his book, is fairly simple:

Play it Safe: Keep as much of your assets as possible in cash and cash equivalents, Prechter recommends, stressing not all money market funds and bank CDs are created equal -- or equally safe. (Prechter also advocates exposure to gold but isn't as bullish on it today as he was in 2002, as discussed here.)

Patience Is a Virtue: "Sit back, relax. Be as safe as you can [and] in safe institutions," he says. "There's a great buying opportunity coming up around 2014, 2016."

Return Of Capital Is Key: "Be very careful," he says. "Don't lose the money you have saved in the markets that are likely to come down in 2010 a long way."

From Prechter's perspective, "there's no negative to getting safe."...

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Stocks and gold rallied sharply Thursday, moving in opposition to the dollar as is so often the case these days.

The inverse correlation between financial assets and the dollar won't change but the trend is about to reverse in a major way, according to Robert Prechter, president of Elliott Wave International and author of Conquer the Crash.

"I think stocks are topping out, commodities are topping out and the dollar is making a bottom," says Prechter, who calls the dollar "one of the most despised" assets in the world.

Ever the contrarian, Prechter cited the heavy bearish sentiment on the dollar when he made similar predictions here in August. Since then, the Dollar Index has made new lows but the dollar has shown intermittent signs of life; in addition, Nouriel Roubini, Martin Wolf and others have made similar forecasts about the potential for a dollar rally.

In the accompanying clip, Prechter also makes the seemingly counterintuitive argument that the dollar will rally because there's so much debt...

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With the Dow Jones Industrial Average once again marching closer to 10,000, many investors, especially those who missed the rally since March, must be asking themselves: Is now the time to finally pull the trigger?

Robert Prechter, founder of Elliott Wave International, implores retail investors stay away… for now. Prechter, who was bullish near the lows in March, now says the stock market "is in a topping area."

Why?

Several factors:

• Slowdown in upside momentum. Recent intraday rallies are petering out before the close.
• Bullish Sentiment. Investors who were bearish near the lows, are now just as bullish after a 60% run in the S&P 500. To Prechter, "that's a dangerous place to be."
• General overvaluation of stocks.

Prechter, the author of Conquer the Crash, says this is akin to the market in 1966-74 or 1929-32, where massive bear rallies gave way to another "big leg down."

American worker productivity surged in the third quarter and new jobless claims fell to their lowest level since January, the government reported today, more signs of a nascent economic recovery. But no one's cheering just yet.

With businesses reluctant to hire, economists forecast the unemployment rate will tick up to 9.9%, when October’s figure is reported tomorrow.

"I think we're going to lose another million jobs between now and the middle of next year," says our guest Leo Hindery, managing partner at InterMedia Partners. Hindery, a former cable executive, has also advised President Obama and John Edwards on economic policy. "There need to be some prescriptions," he says.

His proposed game plan?

Genuine manufacturing policy. With less than 12% of U.S. GDP stemming from manufacturing, the sector must be energized to stabilize and offset an economy now hinged on consumer spending and services. Domestic labor costs are not what's costing Americans jobs, Hindery says. The real culprits are illegal subsidies, currency manipulation and poor environmental practices by our trading "partners," most notably China.

Buy domestic program. While critics cry foul, with charges of protectionism...

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Many media-industry pundits have dismissed Comcast's play for NBC as the latest foray of a deranged distribution guy (Comcast CEO Brian Roberts) obsessed with getting into the content business.

The evidence?  Roberts tried desperately to buy Disney a few years ago--over his shareholders' screams--and now he's furiously negotiating for a hobbled NBC.  All this while fellow cable-content mogul Jeff Bewkes of Time Warner is bemoaning the hard lessons his company learned when it tried to combine content and distribution into the Holy Grail of "synergy."

But Roberts isn't a madman, says Leo Hindery, managing director of private-equity firm InterMedia Partners.

Comcast's goal here...

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Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam – the man accused of the largest insider trading scam in a generation – heads to court later today for a hearing on his request to lower his $100 million bail.

Last week, James Altucher made quite a fuss, when he appeared on Tech Ticker claiming Rajaratnam is alleged of something that shouldn't even be crime.

Jeff Matthews, founding partner of the hedge fund Ram Partners, couldn't disagree more. "If we were to allow insiders to control and profit from insider information I think you create a monster," he proclaims.

In case you missed it, Altucher claims...

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