The Day Ahead: Is the Bond Market Waiting for Retail Sales?

Thursday was an enjoyable day for bond market bulls as both Treasuries and MBS managed to open in positive territory and hold those gains without the same sorts of mid-day meltdowns seen in the previous three sessions.  This then, is probably the beginning of a sideways consolidations we'd been hoping for following the NFP rally (and subsequent bounce).  But whereas the best case scenario ceiling for 10yr yields would naturally be the long term pivot points around 1.83%, a big data surprise this morning could adjust that upward.  One thing Thursday's session did tell us is that Bond markets aren't overly eager to jump back on the rally wagon.  Take a look at 10yr yields 2 days of upwardly biased consolidation.  

If you noticed that the preceding chart, in fact, contained more than the advertised "2 days," you move on to the lightning round.  That's where we zoom out to the longer term uptrend in rates and consider that what we see on the chart above as the time spent below the yellow line could, is the time spent below the long term uptrend in the following chart:

In other words, was the NFP rally merely good for a run at the long term trend boundary (or 200 day moving average, which is the orange line), or was it a break below the pink-ish line around 1.84?  Maybe it's neither.  Only time will tell, but today will be informative because it will clue us in to what bond markets may care about at the moment, or at least allow us to cross something off our list.  We'll get to see how they react to the week's only piece of top tier data (Jobless Claims is also arguably top tier, but it's hard to unequivocally treat it as such on weeks where the Dept. of Labor says it's fishy) all while dancing around the edge of the long term trend.