There's been a lot of talk about GDP recently, but it's important to keep in mind that most of it has to do revised GDP estimates for the first quarter of 2015 due to some recently weak economic data.  The thing being reported today is the final revision of 2014's 4th quarter GDP, which is expected to come in at 2.4%, an upward revision from the previous reading of 2.2%

With all the focus on seemingly already shifted to Q1 2015, will today's data matter?  That's a good question, and there are a few ways to answer it.  For starters, I don't think it MUST matter in the same way NFP always moves markets in the morning.  That said, a big surprise in either direction on GDP can certainly have an effect.  More importantly, we should ask if bond markets are even interested in any economic data this week.  They sure weren't interested in Durable Goods on Wednesday! 

It could end up being the case that tradeflows and technicals remain in control through the end of the quarter, at which point we'll have on Wednesday of NFP week.  Unfortunately, if that's the case, then most of the evidence is negative.  All the garden variety technical indicators are suggesting a shift toward higher rates.  The 21-day exponential moving average (which I don't much fancy, for what it's worth) remains supportive, but yields are right on top of it.  In terms of the bollinger band study seen in the chart below, a break of 2.00 suggests the next major support of 2.20.  Scary!

How about something less scary to balance that out, or at least something that provides perspective.  The next chart shows quarterly candlesticks for Treasury yields.  The bodies of the candles are the opening and closing levels of the quarter.  They're green if the close is lower than the open, red if the close is higher.  Here's the interesting factoid.  If we can avoid getting too close to that 2.20 level, we'll close out the 5th consecutive positive quarter.  That's only ever been seen one other time as far back as my charts would show me, and when it happened, there was a 6th quarter of gains--much bigger gains.

What I thought was most interesting about this historical look-back was that the other example had nothing to do with the post-crisis recovery.  Look at the crisis era!  It's taken massive spikes to get us to the lows--very unlike the past 5 quarters which have been a steady grind of inevitability.  Maybe bonds have just been pacing themselves because they know they have farther to fall (in yield).