Early Close and a 3-Day Weekend

Cash bond trading closes at 2pm ET today.  Data coincided with brief, modest volatility this morning, but it only lasted for 30 minutes.  After that, bonds have been and will continue to be at the mercy of late December trading motivations which tend to create random, illiquid, low-volume movement that defies any of the typical reaction functions.  In other words, whatever we're seeing on the screen today could be considered noise as we wait for cleaner signals in early January.

Next week is perhaps even worse in terms of participation, volume, liquidity, with the one exception being that additional year-end trading will be going on in the background.  Bonds are back in action on Tuesday (closed Monday for Christmas).