Light Holiday Trading Causing Plenty of Early Weakness

The ratio of market movement to justification is off the charts this morning (i.e. lots of movement, but not a lot of apparent justification).  This is the nature of holiday-week trading, especially the winter holidays and especially on Mondays/Fridays.  A smaller number of traders and trades combined with compulsory year-end positioning make for some random volatility in bigger chunks than we'd otherwise see.  This morning is the latest example with 10yr yields up nearly 10bps for what is essentially no reason.

In the bigger picture, rates remain decidedly range bound with 10yr yields between 3.42 and 3.62 for all but a few minutes for more than 2 weeks.  During the holiday lull, nothing inside this range would be considered an interesting or relevant move.