MBS AFTERNOON (alert) : Normal Friday PM Price Action
Cue the Friday music. You know the song... The one where low volume, liquidity, and overall participation precipitate price movements that outly a majority of the weekly trend. So whether or not you decide to care too much about the reprice-alert-worthy price drops at the moment is up to you. Regardless, there is always the risk that some lenders will reprice for the worse when we fall as much as we have in the last 20 minutes. Damage so far? only about 8 ticks from the previous range, or .25 YSP. That's normally good for a .25-.375 reprice. But history shows that unless a downtrend takes shape next week that the pre-noon range from Friday is much more indicative of monday's prices than are these nasty Friday PM hours.
Yes, there's a bounce in MBS already! But does it mean anything? Look to tsy's for a more indicative measurment of the post noon Friday phenomenon. The correlation is downright ridiculous. Sure, 100-28 to 101-00 FEELS like a good range for Monday MBS, but if you have an uber-short termer, sensitive to price changes, here's your warning. So much of the daily volume in the bond market occurs in the early AM, and occassionally in the late PM as the close approaches, but whether that's the book-marking close at 3pm or the "ok, we're really done now" close at 5pm depends on what's going on in the broader market. For today, not much is informing an impending volume spike in the next two hours.
So there's a small chance of reprices... No indication that those reprices hearken a trend shift... tsys and MBS not looking to break any long term resistance... just the normal friday trickle... warning: if you pay attention to this phenomenon too long, you will start taking off at 11:59 on Fridays. Though we'll hit you with a closing commentary between now and then, Monday morning will probably stand as a more than justifiable excuse for early Friday exits...