Bond markets sold off today, and when you see the longer term chart below, it's hard to be too upset about it. The chart not only serves to provide some context for today's weakness, but also some potential causality.
While it's never a guarantee that technical levels will stop a bond market rally dead in it's tracks, when it happens, it can make the weakness easier to understand. In the current case, rates had been falling nicely since the beginning of March, and for that matter, since the beginning of 2014. Yesterday's bigger rally brought us right in line with an important long-term inflection point marked by the mid 1.8 range in 10yr yields.
Simultaneously, yields had also fallen to the lower end of the long-term rally trend. Here again, there's no hard and fast rule that says these lines must force rates to bounce higher, but they do amount to a "vote" of sorts--all things being equal.
And all things were not quite equal today. The economic data was slightly too strong to be ignored. Jobless Claims hasn't caused much of a stir recently, but today's was nearly the best report in 15 years. Factory Orders were strong as well, but let's pretend for a moment those reports don't actually matter as much in and of themselves. In that case they still would have served a purpose today in that they were in no way sufficient to keep the rally going through the resistance levels.
The one disconcerting thing about the chart above is that it means bonds are heading into tomorrow's NFP with much to lose in the event of a big beat, and an uncertain capacity for improvement in the event of a miss.
MBS | FNMA 3.0 102-09 : -0-10 | FNMA 3.5 105-02 : -0-07 | FNMA 4.0 106-29 : -0-06 |
Treasuries | 2 YR 0.5440 : +0.0050 | 10 YR 1.9140 : +0.0550 | 30 YR 2.5340 : +0.0680 |
Pricing as of 4/2/15 4:41PMEST |