As you've likely picked up on, this week has served primarily as a chance for markets to do whatever they need to do ahead of next week's FOMC announcement.  To reiterate yesterday's point, that announcement has nothing to do with whether or not the Fed will hike (they won't, 100% guaranteed), and everything to do with whether or not they give a clue about a December hike (they probably won't do that, but it's definitely less than 100% guaranteed).

That leaves bonds and stocks to drift and consolidate between now and then.  Such instances of consolidation can take many shapes depending on how traders were positioned after the last run of real trading and activity (volumes suggest this was the 14th and 15th in conjunction with NFP day at the beginning of the month).  Between these two points, we have range boundaries that have yet to be broken.

Until and unless this apparent pre-FOMC consolidation range is broken, all we can really do is wait and follow along the intra-range volatility.  To that end, we HAD been able to keep an eye on stock prices as they'd been highly correlated with bond yields in the beginning of the month.  Over the past week, however, they've increasingly diverged.  Rather, stocks have simply done a sort of positive flatline, holding steady to slightly higher in a very narrow range for more than a week. 

Meanwhile, bonds have been moving around a bit more by comparison.  One of the better coincident indicators during that time has been Oil.  I'll be the first to say that we should not expect bonds to take intraday trading cues from every little move in oil.  In fact, they rarely take any direct cues.  Rather, it can be useful to observe which 'side of the debate' oil chooses when stocks and bonds diverge.  In this recent divergence, oil has sided more with bonds.  That helps legitimize our consolidation as something other than a random dip.  Bottom line: bond traders know the Fed needs oil prices to rise in order to firmly commit to a higher rate path.