It's the latest fad: junk bonds!  You might not even know what that is, and you certainly don't need to.  A junk bond is another term for a "high yield" bond, which is another term for a corporate bond with a credit rating that's lower than "investment grade."  We do care a bit about investment grade corporate bonds, and to be fair, it's not a bad thing to care about the high yield sector if you do so in a logical and balanced way.

It is bad to jump on a high-yield bandwagon of lamentation where every market movement gets ascribed to this latest fad.  In other words, why did bonds rally on Friday?  Many voices would say "high yield sector!"  And now today, those same voices would blame today's bond market weakness on the same thing. 

The fact is that markets don't have to have just ONE specific reason for experiencing volatility ahead of the upcoming Fed meeting.  In any event, it would be a mistake to read too much into any ONE reason.  And even then, there are probably better individual candidates for today's gyrations, including the bounce in oil and the fact that so many short positions got washed out on Friday (leaving those traders in a position to set up new shorts heading into Fed day). 

Either way, expect volatility.  Even though we know the Fed will hike, this is still a big deal, and there's plenty of uncertainty as to how market participants will trade after the fact (and apparently before the fact too!).


MBS Pricing Snapshot
Pricing shown below is delayed, please note the timestamp at the bottom. Real time pricing is available via MBS Live.
MBS
FNMA 3.0
99-28 : -0-19
FNMA 3.5
103-00 : -0-17
FNMA 4.0
105-21 : -0-10
Treasuries
2 YR
0.9480 : +0.0690
10 YR
2.2250 : +0.0927
30 YR
2.9560 : +0.0797
Pricing as of 12/14/15 5:43PMEST

Today's Reprice Alerts and Updates
A recap of Alerts and Updates provided to MBS Live subscribers.
1:10PM  :  ALERT ISSUED: Negative Reprices Now Highly Likely
12:31PM  :  ALERT ISSUED: Negative Reprices Increasingly Likely
9:29AM  :  Bonds Unwinding Much of Friday's Panic-Driven Rally

MBS Live Chat Highlights
A recap of featured comments from the Live Discussion on the MBS Live Dashboard.
Bryce Schetselaar  :  "they have the market exactly where they want it. It would be dumb for them not to move now. All credibility would go out the window if they dont"
Nathan Stotlar  :  "How many out there feel the Fed won't move?"
Rich Liu  :  "Hugh, that's pretty good. I'm on par with that. Finally got a dedicated UW resource since my files were being held up by other incomplete files."
Hugh W. Page  :  "I've closed about 3 TRID deals so far and they ranged from 25 days to 35 days from official app date to closing."
Rich Liu  :  "Anyone know where I can get stats on the number of days to close a loan since TRID?"
Hugh W. Page  :  "Trillion"
Ted Rood  :  "$26? Doesn't seem high enough."
Hugh W. Page  :  "It's 26"
Hugh W. Page  :  "Heard an interesting (and startling) statistic this morning on a podcast. What $$ amount of current Worldwide Debt has interest rates of 1% or less?"