With two big-ticket events on tap for bond markets today, there was always a chance that they'd go our way and that we'd see some decent gains as a result.  Thankfully, that happened.

In fact, bonds were already moderately stronger before the first big event--The Consumer Price Index (CPI)--crossed the wires.  Following the weaker CPI reading yields moved quickly lower in the highest single-minute volume since February's CPI release.  Unfortunately, the resulting rally didn't have enough momentum to break through the 2.95% technical level--a pesky floor for 10yr Treasury yields over the past 3 weeks.

Still, the day could still be salvaged if a strong 30yr Bond auction helped yields come around for another attempt.  Indeed the auction was on the strong side.  This is all the more notable because, of the two types of bond auctions (refundings vs reopenings), today's refunding had much stronger stats when compared to other refundings.  

The strong auction logically helped bonds rally again in the afternoon, but here too, there was no noticeable attempt to challenge that 2.95% floor in 10yr yields.  In fact, yields didn't even make it back to the morning lows.  This begs the question: was today's 3-4bp improvement enough given that bonds got all the good news they'd hoped for and were still unable to break that technical floor?  At the very least, we can say that answering "yes" to that question is pretty risky.