MBS MID-DAY: Bullet Dodged After Weaker NFP, But More Coming?

If you observe nothing else from anything I've written this week, it should be the calls for a technical correction on Wednesday and Thursday.  Those had to do with the charts I kept posting showing the 7 consecutive breaks above the upper Bollinger Band in 10yr yields.  Certainly, there aren't groups of anxious traders sitting around counting the breaks of the upper Bollinger band!  It's not as if this is some secret crystal ball that let us know the bounce was coming.  But it was meaningful, and there are probably dozens of other ways the same point could have been made using charts.

The point was/is that we don't have any examples of an 8-day stretch of Bollinger breakouts.  So a bounce back became all but guaranteed after the 7th breakout.  Either that, or things would have gotten very crazy. in a bad way. 

With all this in mind, we didn't even really need NFP today in order to justify the rally we're seeing.  It's 5.5bps in 10yr yields at the moment, and German Bunds are only fractionally stronger.  In other words, I would really like to be seeing more strength here, given the technical cues discussed above.  As it stands, this sort of correction can still show up amid a much larger move higher in yield.  Of course, this sort of correction can also show up at the beginning of a big reversal to lower rates, but the point is that we didn't end up getting too much clarity based on this reaction. 

Bottom line, it's definitely better than most of the alternatives, but it's not nearly enough to give us unequivocal assurance that the sell-off is defeated.