MBS Live Week Ahead: Bonds Will Need at Least a Day to Get Back to Business

New Years Day doesn't always fall on a day that allows for a 3.5-day weekend.  When it does (as it did this year), the first day back to work tends to be an extension of the vacation for financial markets unless something significant happened over the weekend.  

Nothing significant happened over the weekend.

All that to say that bond markets aren't walking in the door today and suddenly revealing clearly-defined trading biases simply because it's 2018.  It will take at least a day before we see the beginning of "something new" for 2018, and it may well take a week or two. 

In any event, we can be certain that it is not being seen so far this morning.  US and European bond markets are both simply extending the narrow trend channels seen heading into the end of last week.

There's no significant economic data today to suggest a market reaction, but we'll get both the ISM reports and NFP (the big jobs report) by the end of the week.  Whether or not markets care about these 3 top tier reports is another matter.  They haven't been big market movers recently despite being 3 of the biggest stars in the market movement hall of fame.

As is often the case in January, the first major dose of new momentum tends to come from the "unseen hand" of tradeflow momentum.  In other words, we're waiting to see if traders will shift their positional biases for the new year.  To belabor the point, that's the sort of thing that tends to become more evident in the second full week of trading, but it wouldn't be out of the question to see some early clues this week.