MBS RECAP: Bonds Lose Ground After Head-Fake Toward Modest Gains

After Friday's aggressive sell-off, bond markets managed only a modest bounce back before acquiescing to even weaker levels by the close.  There were no data or headline events to motivate any salient runs in either direction today.  This remained true from the start of overnight trading right through to the after-hours domestic close.

Instead, what we had was a blatant lack of sponsorship for Treasuries and MBS after reaching certain levels.  The biggest, hardest floor was hit at 1.885 just after 5am.  In my mind, this is a significant short term level now as it was an utterly unique decision for US bond markets.  European bonds continued to rally until 7am while Treasuries had long since decided to bounce.

Technical levels or not, the simple fact that Treasuries took it upon themselves to bounce early set the tone for the rest of the day.  There was simply no traction to be had.  We can point to things like the upcoming round of auctions in concert with the big Microsoft corporate bond offering saturating the market with debt supply bidding needs, but we won't really know how much of the weakness this accounts for until Thursday at the earliest.  Bottom line: if we're waiting to see where bond traders are going to firmly reenter the market to "buy the dip," we haven't gotten there yet.