MBS Abbreviation Guide
CC's (Current Coupons) - Basically it's whichever coupon in the FNMA 30 yr fixed stack that happens to be the most liquid or closest to par.
Choppy - refers the the prices of MBS vacillating wildly (big differences between highs and lows and lots of back and forth in between).
MBS - Mortgage Backed Security
MDPC - Mid Day Price Change (plus means for the better, minus for the worse)
DOW or DJIA - Dow Jones Industrial Average
Ticks - 1/32nds of bond pricing. 8 ticks=8/32nds=.25 in cost (YSP or discount)
DoD, YoY, MoM - Day over day, year over year, month over month, etc..
O/N - Overnight
Coupon - The "interest rate' of the MBS
6.0's, 5.5's - always means FNMA 30yr Fixed MBS with a coupon of that number. 6.0's = 6.0% coupon rate MBS
PCE - Personal Consumption Expenditures, a component of the Income and Outlay report and one of the Fed's preferred inflation indicators
UST - United States Treasury Bonds. 5UST = 5 year, 10UST = 10 year, etc..
NAPM (PMI) -National association of purchasing management (Purchasing Manager's Index)
ISM (MFG) - Institute for Supply Management (mfg: manufacturing)
Wide/Gap/Gappy - refers to the wideness or gap between treasury yields and MBS yields.
"Going Out" - 4:45PM EST. Official Close is 3pm EST
FI - "fixed income." For our purposes, will simply refer to treasuries and MBS
NFP - Non-Farm Payrolls. Key part of employment report. Most meaningful gauge of labor market
ADP - ADP private payrolls, some feel a precursor to NFP, but historically quasi-accurate at best.
GSE - Government Sponsored Enterprise. Refers to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac
PPI - Producer Price Index. A key inflation indicator.
CPI - Consumer Price Index. An even more key inflation indicator.
belly / wing - refers to the different portions of the "stack" (the range of different MBS coupons within a certain coupon type. If a coupon type is a FNMA 30 year fixed, then the range of coupons could be from 4.5-8.0. The "belly" refers to the two or three coupons that are trading closest to PAR (price of 100-00). So since the 6.0 is currently at PAR (ish), and neither the 6.5 or the 5.5 are more than 3 points away, this would be the belly. The wings would be all other coupons.
48 hour class A notification - MBS are really TBA MBS meaning that the actual pools of loans that will compose the security are not necessarily decided at the time of the trade. In this case, I could say that I'd like to sell 1 million dollars of 6.5's today on August 11th, even though I might not have funded any loans. My settlement date for that million would not be occurring until some predetermined date in the future (usually 3 months or less out, the quicker, the better the price I get), In this case, it would be 9/11/08. As long as I fund 1 mil of securitizeable loans by then, I can begin to NOTIFY the buyer that purchased my loans of what the pool will contain, or if I will "roll" to an October delivery. After 48 hours, then it's time to actual finalize the transaction ("settlement").