As worthless as it often is to pin every move in the trading day to a single data point, it seemed apt on Friday to see stocks take a hit on the premarket jobs data, fight back through the first half of the session, then ultimately roll over, as if to admit “this is more than we can handle.”

Stocks finished at their lowest level in about 10 weeks as a hugely disappointing employment report had to make even the most optimistic investor more concerned that an economic recovery is beginning to stall.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 97 points to 12,151, the Nasdaq fell 41 points to 2733, and the S&P 500 retreated 13 points to 1300.

Notable on Friday – and a break from the past few weeks – was how commodities and equities were not in lockstep:  crude oil finished essentially flat at $100.31 a barrel, while gold gained and silver shed a few pennies.

Bonds, however, behaved as expected on glum economic data, with the 10-year Treasury note’s yield falling to 3%.

Little in the employment report offered much cause for celebration: 

• The unemployment rate inched up to 9.1%, despite expectations it would remain flat at 9%.
• The private sector added just 83,000 jobs in April, and the prior two months’ growth was revised lower – which cut the three-month average to 160,000 jobs added. As economist David Rosenberg noted, what is normal 23 months into a recovery phase is for 174,000 jobs to be added each month.
• Manufacturing lost 5,000 jobs, bringing the average gain over the past three months to 13,000. Even assuming manufacturing will return to adding 10,000 jobs a month, it would take that sector 20 years to return to pre-recession levels of employment.
• The overall employment-to-population ratio was unchanged at 58.4% — just 0.2% points above the downturn’s low. The ratio for black Americans fell to another all-time low at 51.2%.
• Unemployment durations are also lengthening again, with the mean duration of 39.7 weeks out of work hitting a new high for the current employment decline.

With fear increasingly gripping investors, the speculative instinct has understandably taken a hit: the small-cap Russell 2000 index fell 1.5% to its lowest closing level since March 22.

Friday’s underperformance of tech stocks took a cue from a selloff in semiconductors. The Semiconductor HOLDRs (NYSE:SMH) exchange-traded fund fell 2.1% to its lowest level since mid-April.

With stocks down 3.3% this week alone, a show of strength next week wouldn’t be a complete surprise. But longer-term concerns are now officially impossible to ignore.