Benchmarks Hit Technical Resistance After Housing Data. MBS Lag

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WASHINGTON, Jan 25 (Reuters) - U.S. single-family home prices fell for a fifth straight month in November and a double-dip in home prices could be confirmed by spring, a closely watched survey said on Tuesday. The Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller composite index of 20 metropolitan areas declined 0.5 percent in November from October on a seasonally adjusted basis, though it was not as sharp as the 0.8 percent fall expected by economists.  Prices have fallen 1.6 percent in the past year, sharper than the 1.4 percent predicted by economists polled by Reuters.
 
Plain and Simple: This isn't the case in every city but for the most part home prices are being pressured lower by excessive amounts of excess inventory and a generally apathetic attitude. Buyers are more than willing to wait and see if prices  fall further. When people ask me if I would buy a home right now,  I say yes but only a house that doesn't have a close substitute. Only a house that doesn't have an slutty twin sister.  Certainly not a townhouse or a condo.

10s rallied overnight on negative GDP news in not so Great Britain.  One more quarter of contraction and guess what...the UK is right back in recession! We call that a double-dip. Anyway benchmark interest rates moved lower after the data flashed in London. We were bid near their best levels of the day when Case-Shiller printed and although the number was poor it was still slightly better than expected. This gave traders an incentive to book a tactical profit but the move seems to based on technicals rather than fundamentals.

Note the 10yr note yield chart below. 10s are currently testing a long-term 50% fibonacci retracement.  The market's first attempt to break that technical resistance level has failed. If we had to guess, barring an outlier Consumer Confidence read at 10am...we'd say benchmark 10s are likely to bounce back and forth between 3.35% and 3.40% for the rest of the day.  If we had to pick a close, we'd be more biased toward short covering and close near 3.35% today.

Mortgages are lagging TSYs. Production MBS coupons are flat to slightly weaker.....

Consumer Confidence at 10