The Day Ahead: Focus Shifts to Europe, Last Auction of the Week

As always, markets have priced in everything that's "known" and moved into position to digest the "unknown."  In the current case, that means that bond markets got a large dose of positivity following the Obama victory and stocks had their single worst day of the year.  The election was the "unknown"--causing volatility before it became "known," whereupon markets reacted and have moved on to new unknowns on the horizon.

This way of looking at things is a bit oversimplified, but generally speaking, we have indeed moved on to Thursday's ECB rate announcement and Draghi press conference as being the "next big thing" for markets.  Whether or not it's anywhere nearly as big as was the reaction to the presidential election is unlikely, but remains to be seen.  Either way, bond markets apparently got their fill of the post-election rally and moved into a bit more of a defensive position heading into the ECB. 

Muddying the waters to some extent is the fact that Thursday morning offers the first significant domestic economic releases of the week, and they both occur at the same time that ECB President Mario Draghi begins his press conference (determining exactly what time "stuff in Europe" happens is always more challenging after a daylight savings time change, but after hours of research, we think we've narrowed this one down to 8:30am Eastern time, same as usual).

The domestic data includes weekly Jobless Claims, seen rising to 370k from 363k last time but with a decline in Continued claims (3.253 mln consensus vs 3.263 previous for those of you playing along at home).  The other 8:30am report is International Trade ("trade deficit") which is expected to widen slightly from $44.2 bln to $45.0 in the red.  The auction cycle concludes at 1pm with 30yr Bonds.  If all goes according to plan, however, the tenor of the day is most likely to be set by the ECB bright and early, with things like the 30yr Auction being mere afterthoughts, assuming it's remotely in line with historical averages and yield expectations.