MBS Week Ahead: Limited Data; Important Auctions; Banks Closed Tuesday

With bonds closed on Tuesday for Veterans Day, market participation should be lighter than normal today.  That said, it won't be as light as it would be on some holiday weeks considering that futures remain open.  The implication is that we'll have to wait until Wednesday to determine whether the "high fly ball" hit on Friday will turn out to be a home run or something less exciting. 

Bond market home runs do definitely start out this way, but they can quickly turn ugly.  Wednesday-Friday must be watched closely for any signs that rates fall into the same pattern seen last November when a positive technical bounce instead gave way to a pervasive trend of weakness for the rest of the year.  In this chart, the lower two sections are momentum oscillators where higher = weaker and lower = stronger.

We'll see what we'll see soon enough, but the point is that we can't really be sure we're looking at reality until those last three days of the week.  This works out perfectly for Treasury auctions as well because today's 3yr auction is the least-important of the bunch.  The only top tier data release is on Friday morning with Retail sales at 8:30am.