Yesterday was a bad day.  If you need to revisit it, or if you happened to knock yourself unconscious the first time or two you fell out of your chair and simply need to catch up on what you missed, here is the recap.

Is this the end?  You know... the end of low rates forever? 

I suppose that depends on what your definition of "forever" is.  I'll deny it if you ever ask me, but at some point in the future, I think the world will settle in to a natural rate range of sovereign 10yr yields between 1 and 2 percent, maybe lower.  I know that sounds crazy but keep in mind, I'm talking about years and years down the road.  Japan will be there waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

In the meantime though--and in the very VERY big picture that we must consider with early 2015 being a "higher low" in yields from 2012--we could lose an awful lot of ground.  Even if the super long term trend continues grinding down toward the low, flat range that has characterized Japan, mere course corrections could seem catastrophic in the short term.  No one wants to imagine what a move up to 3.5% in the 10yr would do to the mortgage market, but it wouldn't even break the longer term trendline!

Moving on... what's all this talk about crows and soldiers?  Japan is relevant here too as the weird words pertain to Japanese candlestick patterns.  In this case, it's either "three black crows" or "three white soldiers" depending on whether you're moving up or down.  The name doesn't really matter, but the pattern does.

Candlestick patterns certainly aren't crystal balls.  It's fun to pretend like they are, but you only need to get burned by them once or twice to give them up.  The same is true of any technical analysis really, which is why they can only ever be taken for what they're worth, and mixed into a more diverse, individually edited recipe for you approach market movement. 

For me personally, this pattern is one of the few I pay attention to.  To be clear, that doesn't mean it always results in the same thing, but it does more often than not.  This time around, there is an outside possibility that we're just witnessing a forceful correction in tradeflows from the May's month-end lull to June's re-invigoration of the range.  In a market as illiquid as this, and with Draghi's comments yesterday, it would have been easy to overshoot the range.  All that having been said, I'm intentionally trying to cheer you up.  It's probably not that simple.

The three black crows are harbingers of doom--either immediate or delayed.  Every so often they are a false alarm, but the extent to which that's true this time will likely depend on Friday's NFP.