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Wall Street is heavily focused on Friday’s jobs report. We got a sneak preview today with the report from ADP (ADP), the private payroll folks. According to ADP, the economy lost 20,000 private sector jobs during February. That’s pretty bad. ADP also revised lower the job losses for January from 22,000 to 60,000. The only bright spot is that this is the smallest decline since the jobs numbers started going negative. So it’s not much of a bright spot at that.

For Friday, the Street expects the government numbers to show an increase in unemployment to 10% from 9.7%, and nonfarm payrolls to drop by 55,000.

I recently mentioned that Bristol-Myers (BMY) looked like a good value. The company just announced that Lamberto Andreotti will be their new CEO. Andreotti was made president and COO last year. This is an interesting time for the company. BMY’s recent strategy has been to shed anything that doesn’t deal directly with drugs. They’re doing the exact opposite of diversifying. With their hugely successful drug Plavix going off patent next year, they need to alter their business. Expect to see a string of acquisitions here. BMY has a gigantic cash horde of $10 billion.

Posted by edelfenbein at March 3, 2010 9:43 AM