The Day Ahead: Little More than an Opening Act for Friday's NFP

Sometimes opening acts are surprisingly entertaining, or perhaps even moving.  But more often than not, the headliner is what you came to see and the opener is less than memorable.  Such is the case with Thursday and Friday.  On any other week, today's line-up of economic reports borders on impressive, but now that we've seen just how silent and sideways bond markets were willing to be when all was said and done with GDP and FOMC, it's clear they're not waiting with bated breath for the Jobless Claims, Incomes/Outlays, or Chicago PMI reports this morning.

Referring to Wednesday's session as "sideways" requires a bit of clarification.  There was actually an extraordinary amount of volatility intraday, and it was only by virtue of closing levels being relatively in line with Tuesday's closing levels that we'd begin to think of it as a sideways day.  As far as Thursday is concerned, there's less on tap to cause the same sort of ups and downs we saw on Wednesday.  That said, the "day before NFP Friday," regardless of its economic data, always has some chance of becoming the "lead off" day for the underlying directional biases.  At this point, any such lead-off would be an extra bearish sort of thing as it would once-again take us out of the longer term uptrend in yields that was only tested previously on NFP Friday in early January.