MBS Week Ahead: Time to Find Out About This Bounce

If you've been out for 3-4 weeks, welcome back.  Bonds have been selling off rather abruptly and now we're hoping for a bounce.  We thought we had one after NFP Friday (well, not all of us), but it turned out to be a false start.  Then last week saw a repeat performance of the previous week's Thu/Fri rally.  This time around, the bounce potential looked more convincing.  Others agree--even if it they didn't say so until Sunday (that's OK, they wrote more).

The point of the preceding recap is to set the stage.  The players were definitely playing through the middle of last week, but Thursday and Friday equated to a drawing of the curtain.  When it reopens this week, we may be treated to a completely different scene. 

As far as this week's events, the most notable calendar item is the release of the Minutes from April's FOMC meeting.  It's notable simply because the Fed is always notable--not because we're necessarily expecting any groundbreaking info to come out of it.  Indeed, the announcement produced at the most recent meeting was right down the middle.  That said, it has wild card potential for two reasons.

First, the Fed removed the following statement which appeared in the March Announcement: "an increase in the target range for the federal funds rate remains unlikely at the April FOMC meeting."  Most of the free world saw this as the exceptionally logical consequence of the April meeting having concluded.  After all, it wouldn't make much sense to talk about what you might do at your April meeting if it had already happened and you weren't having another one!  Still, some saw this as a suggestion that June was now a possibility for a rate hike.  Their thinking was/is that the Fed would have simply updated the verbiage to reflect the advancing calendar if they weren't ready to start.  In my view, that level of inference is a bit silly, largely because the Fed's original verbiage was silly and expressed FAR too much fear and/or consideration of the market's potential feelings.  Fed speakers have since said they'd rather keep markets guessing a bit.

Second--and much more simply--the April 29th announcement coincided with an escalation in the bond market sell-off.  So even if the consensus on the announcement seems to have been that it was a non-issue, perhaps it wasn't.  It wouldn't be the first time a majority of market participants missed a relevant clue from the past (Bernanke's comments in March 2013 come to mind, which I recapped in painful detail).

Bottom line, with a 2015 rate hike still probably on the table, every meeting and every reading of the meeting minutes matters from here on out.  Other things that matter include but are not limited to:

• the status of the European bond market rout (also has bounce potential)
• corporate debt issuance (we've gotten through a few of the bigger deals expected this spring)
• other economic data (though there's not much of it this week)
• technical/tradeflow-based trading considerations (2.34-2.36 is a major, super-long-term pivot point in 10yr yields and we bounced pretty hard there last week.  More improvement will make it look like a harder bounce and bring in more buyers)