MBS CLOSE: The Last Post Of The Day

By: Matthew Graham

I know how it is....   A lot of the time when I'm reading on the internet, even if it's from one of my favorite sites, there are many occasions where I simply will not read the entirety of an article if it looks like it's going to take too much time out of my day to read.  AQ and I know this happens here as well, and eventually, it will be an easy task to navigate right to a "short version" and a "long version." 

With that said, there is not much more to say about trading today.  I suppose the fact that 4.5's went out at 99-20 is "kinda cool" considering the "most significant technical level of the year was only broken for one day yesterday and thus, with today's close, fails to confirm.  ("confirmation" in a technical sense meaning that a change in trend is not confirmed on the actual day it breaks the technical price level, but instead must hold a certain percentage below or above the break). 

Tomorrow we get Housing Starts, Citi, GE, and BofA earnings, not to mention more political stuff as the House Financial Services will be discussing the Obama Adminstration's Financial Regulatory Reform Proposals

Even if tomorrow turns out to be a positive day for fixed income, considering what yield spreads did today, there is the possibility that MBS get outperformed by TSYs tomorrow ("catching-up"). We'll skip the more detailed enumeration of tomorrow's potentialities and the beautiful beautiful charts I know you're all so fond of, so that some additional focus might be paid to the following sentence:

If you read nothing else today, or even this week on this blog, I think that you will find no better distilled summary on the factors that create volatility and swings in the MBS market of late than last night's closing post. 

If you haven't read or internalized it, doing so now will do more to arm you for interest rate and mortgage market conversations than any chart or news or crystal ball predictions I could post.  So go to it!  AND if something about it isn't readily internalized, let us know in the comments and we'll add your question to our secretly growing knowledge base.

If you are a mortgage/real estate professional, make sure you give this a read too...."PRESERVING HOMEOWNERSHIP PROGRESS NEEDED TO PREVENT FORECLOSURES"