Ground Floor: Maybe it's not a jobless recovery after all. The last time jobs numbers came out from the US, employment was continuing to slide. The decline surprised analysts who'd expected things to be better.

In the latest set of numbers, analysts were equally surprised by the fact that non-farm payrolls in September had gone up for the first time in eight months and unemployment levels held steady. Not exactly mind-blowing news, you'd think, but the markets loved it and stocks soared.

Then, just as people were getting a little too excited by the prospect of people maybe having jobs again, the Labour Department announced that it expected to revise up past unemployment data which took the wind out of traders' sails.

But there's an underlying positive sentiment that won't go away which is underpinning a more optimistic view on the future of the US economy.

However - there's always a however - at the same time the Chicago Purchasing Managers report indicated that there was weakness seen in all the components of the index.

Yet the Beige Book reported that Chicago had seen an improvement in manufacturing which had caused an increase in demand for machine tools and industrial equipment. No wonder trading is volatile!

At the moment, though, the improvement in the unemployment figures has won the hearts (if not the minds) of market participants and owning shares is no longer a highway to hell. Not only that, but I heard an interview with an investment club on the radio as I sat in traffic in Fairview, Dublin, the other morning, and I read about another one in the papers later in the week.

I can't decide whether to be terrified or not by the emergence of the amateur investment club onto the market radar again. The last time I was on a discussion panel with a woman from an investment club the markets imploded a few days later. At the time she was talking about the growth prospects for stocks I'd never even heard of.

I don't want to be a misery-guts but if you do decide to join a club, join one that does some in-depth research before it commits to anything.

I haven't done anything about my own portfolio in ages. I've been too busy to spend any time looking at the individual shares that I own even though I know that most of them are still under water.

The thing about dabbling in the markets, though, is that you have to have your eye on the ball the whole time. If you can't do that then you should simply buy into a fund. Of course the reason that investment clubs set up is that they reckon they can do better than the managed funds. Certainly the ones I heard about had beaten the indexes and the professionals by a few percentage points over the last year.

The reason isn't that all the market professionals are stupid. But they have to own a greater spread of stocks than most clubs. In a bigger pool there's bound to be some smelly fish although they're paid well enough to keep the stinkers to a minimum.

While the US picture is still somewhat unclear, the NCB Purchasing Managers' Services Index has shown considerable improvement at home with the business activity index rising sharply for the fourth month in a row. This brings it to its highest level in 17 months.

The rate of expansion of new business is also higher and employment growth as well as staffing levels are significantly higher too. This should be welcome news for a government which has successfully managed to convince us all that December's Budget will have us scouring the department stores for the latest line in hair shirts again.

The main problem continues to be inflation. Despite the fact that a lot of inflationary pressure is of the Government's own making, firms reported significant upward pressure on costs during September while at the same time showing a fall in charges. This means that the competitive nature of the market has seen margins tighten as companies struggle to maintain market share.

But business confidence is still higher which is positive - despite those slimmer margins it's good to know that the services sector, at least, is feeling positive about the months ahead.

To be honest, I didn't spend a lot of time looking at business stories this week because I was caught up in the running of an international badminton tournament for under-17s. I abandoned the home office and took up residence in the hall.

Eighteen European countries including Ireland took part and I got a greater kick out of watching the various teams chant, scream and beat their drums than I ever did out of seeing the Dow rise 100 points.

There were some niggling things from my point of view. Photocopiers have become much more sophisticated even in the last three years. The one I used gave me far more information and instructions than I needed simply to get a copy of one page.

And, of course, I was using the dreaded Microsoft Windows operating system, the buggiest system in the world! I'm astonished that most of the business world seems to be able to keep going while using Windows.

The amount of down-time due to looking at incomprehensible error messages and re-booting the system is absolutely ridiculous. Windows users seem to accept crashes as part and parcel of office life.

Improvement in information technology was one of the reasons businesses did so well over the past few years. If Windows worked properly it might spur the recovery even more.

And then those employment numbers might become as stable as a Mac operating system.