The Day Ahead: Busiest Day of Data, Auctions and Earnings

It might not have been possible to view Thursday as the busiest day of the week for "data, auctions, and earnings" had it not been for the incredibly tepid reaction to all of the above in Wednesday's session.  In other words, Thursday wins by default because hindsight hasn't yet proven it to be as inconsequential as Wednesday.  Beyond that, there actually is MORE in terms of the number of economic reports, and they're concentrated in the US session in the morning.

After a sparse overnight calendar in Europe and Asia, the domestic session kicks off with Jobless Claims, Durable Goods, and Chicago Fed's National Activity Index all at 8:30am.  The latter isn't generally a market mover, but at least adds to that sense of "busy-ness" right out of the gate.  As seen in the Economic calendar below, Durable Goods printed an abysmal -13.2 last month and is expected to be +7.1 percent today.  That sort of gap between the previous reading and current expectation leaves a fairly large playing field for the actual result, potentially clouding the logical market movements that would follow anything that's close to consensus. 

Slightly later in the morning, there's a bit more data with Pending Home Sales for September at 10am.  On the housekeeping front, the Fed has $4.5 to $5.5 bln in 8-10yr Treasuries to buy (scheduled "twist") at 10:15 and Treasury has $29 bln in 7yr Notes to sell at 1pm.  Markets didn't seem to be at all interested in yesterday's weak 5yr auction and we're thinking it would take a small miracle (either positive or negative) for the 7yr variety to do anything different.  With Europe relatively silent and earnings season in full swing, if bond markets arent' marching to their own beat after the AM data, it seems likely that they'll be taking at least some of their cues from stocks again today.