Big Intraday Round Trip For Bonds; Williams Helped Bonds spent the first half of the day pressing into even weaker levels in spite of a respectable drop in oil prices. Data and headlines had little to no bearing on the selling. If anything, the biggest scapegoat is the combination of bearish momentum and quarter-end trading (something we're extrapolating from the mirror-image correlation between stocks and bond yields). 10yr yields crested 5.29% at their weakest levels--right in line with the only obvious nearby technical level from 2007. Bearishness reversed at 2pm when Fed Gov Williams said…
Mortgage rates moved higher again on Tuesday as the bond market continues recalibrating expectations for Fed policy, economic growth, and inflation. The weakness is especially frustrating considering a fairly large drop in oil prices today, but as we discussed yesterday, rates have a lot more on their mind than oil these days. Our top-tier 30yr fixed rate index rose from 7.50 to 7.58% today--the highest since November 1st, 2023. In this sense, mortgage rates are doing much better than their often-cited benchmark, the 10yr Treasury yield, which is the highest level since 2007. That's because…
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Bonds were initially modestly stronger overnight, but mostly sideways in the bigger picture. Right at the 8:20am CME open, bond sellers were clearly waiting in line to sell. This is another small anecdote that potentially suggests month/quarter-end trading is contributing to this week's volatility. It could also be an ongoing defensive stance ahead of this week's high-stakes econ data (this morning's JOLTs being today's most pressing example, coming up at 10am ET). The weakness completely ignored a fairly substantial drop in oil prices. We'll see more about what's what after 10am.
Bond-Specific Weakness Over the past 6 months, as bonds continued to sell off, there was frequently some solace in the fact that the rate spike correlated with oil or diesel prices enough to hope that an oil price recovery would pave the way for a rate recovery. While there's likely still some benefit for bonds from a large, sustained drop in oil prices, the broader disconnect is increasingly conspicuous. Today was the latest example. Yields appeared to track with oil on the way up (for the most part). But when oil reversed course and moved back to 'unchanged' on the day, bond yields were…
Despite Friday afternoon's promising bond market rally and mortgage rate improvement, today's top tier 30yr fixed rate bounced back up. The average lender is now at 7.50% for the first time since April 30, 2024. While there's been a lot of short-term correlation between oil prices and interest rates over the last 6 months, oil does a poor job of explaining much of the recent upward momentum in rates. At times today, it seemed that the higher rates coincided with higher oil prices, but oil fell all the way back to Friday afternoon's levels at one point while rates remained elevated. The…
We’re waist deep in conferences (click here to view or add events), and every week I receive a half a dozen invitations to mortgage golf events centered around a conference. How about coming up with something where you can see and talk to more than three other people for 3-4 hours? Group hikes? Make-a-bear? Mini-golf? Bowling? Croquet? Pretzel making? Axe throwing? Perhaps we’ll see companies and state organizations shift their fund raising away from golf outings toward pickleball and bocce ball. Are President’s Award trips on their way out? There is no doubt that we should all celebrate…
Bonds lost ground overnight with traders reacting to Trump's rejection of Iran's proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. This isn't the first time that bonds have reacted to war headlines regardless of movement in oil prices. While oil also moved higher throughout the overnight session, bonds are increasingly detached in the bigger picture with yields staying relatively higher as they wait for a substantive change in the war or the economy. For all of the drama and volatility, it's really that simple.
Respectable Recovery. Is It a Trap? First thing's first: the parabolic flourish of bond selling of the past 2 weeks is arguably unprecedented in recent memory. Specifically, we've seen similar levels of overall weakness over similar time frames, but we haven't seen the same sort of concentrated acceleration of selling at the tail end of a months-long selling trend. The only remotely comparable precedent was late September 2023 when a Fed dot plot surprised the market with a higher rate outlook followed by 2 weeks of stronger-than-expected econ data. There was a decent recovery on several…
The new home market returned to the longer-term range last month, with sales seeing their 4th biggest rebound in 4 years. Sales of new single-family homes rose to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 684,000 in August, up 6.4% from July's revised 643,000 but 2.0% below the same month last year. The increase puts sales back above the 600,000 mark after July's pullback, although the broader trend remains relatively flat. The number of new houses for sale was virtually unchanged at 483,000 , down 2.0% from a year earlier. With sales picking up while inventory held steady, the implied…
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