MBS Day Ahead: Momentum May be Shifting for Rates Even Before NFP

Momentum has been great for rates/bond markets almost exclusively in 2014 until the past two sessions.  If today's session errs on the weak side again, we could see bonds carry a certain predisposition toward weakness into tomorrow's NFP data.  While such a thing wouldn't matter more than a big beat or miss, if NFP happens to be fairly close to consensus, the underlying momentum could matter more.

So in essence, we're really only talking about a "what if" scenario on the chance that tomorrow's data is equivocal.  Part of the concern is due to the phenomenon of bond markets breaking away from the stock lever noted yesterday.  Here's an updated chart with some early overnight trading:

And here's what a modest amount of weakness would do to the longer term technicals.  It's not important to understand the individual components of the chart, simply that "up = bad."  The technical studies (narrow, lower 3 sections) are the fairly mainstream stochastics, MACD, and RSI.  They're all at risk of giving their most negative outlook on momentum since at least mid-January, and in one case, mid-October!

Again, this is all for naught if NFP falls very far from consensus, but so is anything else I could say...

The day's economic events aren't overly significant with Jobless Claims being the only somewhat respectable market mover.  We'll also get Productivity/Costs and International Trade at the same time (8:30am), but it's unlikely that any significant market movement would trace itself back to these reports.   Just as relevant as anything else would be the ECB press conference that starts at the same time, but this isn't an instance where drama is expected.